Targeting the Anuak

Summary

Since late 2003, the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF)
has committed numerous human rights violations against Anuak communities in the
Gambella region of southwestern Ethiopia
that may amount to crimes against humanity.These abuses have taken place in a region plagued by longstanding ethnic
tensions to which the Ethiopian military has become a party.

On December 13, 2003, a brutal ambush allegedly committed by
armed Anuak sparked a bloody three-day rampage in the regional capital in which
ENDF soldiers joined "highlander" mobs in the destruction of the town's Anuak
neighborhoods.As many as 424 people
were killed, almost all of them Anuak.The mobs burned over four hundred houses to the ground and ransacked and
looted many of those left standing.The
December 2003 massacre was not the first time ENDF soldiers had committed human
rights abuses against civilians in Gambella, but it was a turning point in
Gambella's long history of conflict and insecurity.

In the fourteen years since the overthrow of the brutal Derg
dictatorship in 1991, the new age of prosperity and peace promised by the
government has eluded the people of Gambella.Long-simmering ethnic tensions have repeatedly boiled over into violence
that has left hundreds dead and thousands homeless, while federal and regional
authorities have taken almost no effective action to protect victims or punish
their attackers.The prevailing state of
insecurity throughout the region and the instability of areas along Gambella's
long border with Sudan
have led to an ever-increasing Ethiopian military presence in the region.

Until December 2003, the garrison of ENDF soldiers stationed
in Gambella had not become involved in the region's increasingly frequent
ethnic clashes.It became more difficult
for the army to remain uninvolved, however, as longstanding tensions between
Gambella's Anuak population and its large community of onetime migrants from
other parts of Ethiopia,
known locally as "highlanders," began to escalate.A series of attacks attributed to Anuak
gunmen left more than twenty highlander civilians dead in the second half of
2003, and Gambella's mainly Anuak regional authorities proved unable or
unwilling to bring the situation under control.The vast majority of the military personnel in Gambella are drawn from
the same ethnic groups that make up the region's highlander community and
December 13 marked the moment the Ethiopian military entered into the conflict
against the Anuak.What had been a
situation marked by long-simmering tensions that erupted sporadically into
violence was transformed into a broad-based assault by the Ethiopian army
against Gambella's Anuak population.

Since December 2003, the military has set about finding and
destroying the disparate groups of armed Anuak collectively referred to as shifta-organized Sudan-based rebels,
farmers carrying out isolated revenge attacks in retaliation for past military
abuses, and a small number of radicalized gunmen-it believes to be responsible
for attacks on the highlander population.This has become a pretext for numerous bloody and destructive raids on
Anuak villages and neighborhoods; more than 100 Anuak men, women and children
were killed since the December 2003 massacre in the nineteen communities
surveyed by Human Rights Watch alone, entire villages were burned to the ground
and thousands of families were driven from their homes.

The prevailing climate of impunity that now exists in
Gambella has allowed ENDF soldiers to prey upon and terrorize the Anuak
communities they patrol.In dozens of
communities, soldiers have raped Anuak women, beaten and tortured young men to
the point of serious injury or death and looted homes and public
buildings.Ordinary people now flee upon
spotting approaching ENDF soldiers, and thousands of Anuak have been displaced
or driven out of the country as refugees.

The Ethiopian government's efforts to halt these abuses or
punish those responsible have been grossly inadequate.A commission of inquiry set up to investigate
the December 2003 massacre absolved the military of any wrongdoing, and federal
authorities have taken no apparent action to investigate ongoing human rights
violations in the region.When community
leaders complain about these abuses to ENDF officers they are sent away with
empty promises or even threats of further violence.Only a handful of soldiers have been held to
account for any of the crimes ENDF forces have committed since December
2003.To date, higher-ranking ENDF
officers have been effectively beyond the reach of justice because of the
federal government's refusal to investigate persistent complaints of ENDF
abuse.

The motivations behind the military's assault on the Anuak
population-and the government's failure to address it-remain unclear.Many victims' testimonies seem to indicate
that ENDF officers and soldiers, frustrated by their inability to find and
destroy the armed Anuak groups they are looking for, have come to believe that
the entire Anuak population is colluding with their elusive enemies.Other abuses, including many of the reported
rapes and incidents of looting, seem to be crimes of opportunity fueled by the
near-total lack of accountability.Federal authorities, meanwhile, eager to see the troublesome region
pacified, have at the very least shown themselves willing to turn a blind eye
to what is happening.Whether or not
federal officials are actively complicit in ongoing abuses or aware of
precisely how widespread and serious they have been, they have certainly given
the military a green light to employ tactics that could only be expected to
result in a human rights disaster.The
government should know what its military is doing to the Anuak and take steps
to prevent it.

Human Rights Watch believes that the widespread human rights
violations committed against the Anuak population are indicative of crimes
against humanity.It urges concerned
states, which have ignored serious rights abuses in Gambella since the December
2003 massacre, to pressure the Ethiopian government to halt the abuses and take
serious steps to prosecute all of those responsible.

This report is based on a recent three-week Human Rights
Watch research mission to the capital Addis Ababa
and towns in Gambella, as well as interviews conducted with Anuak refugees
living in Ruiru, Kenya.This report does not document every incident
of human rights abuse that ENDF forces have committed in Gambella since
December 2003; rather, it describes a continuing pattern of abuse of Anuak
communities throughout Gambella since December 2003.[1]It also describes abuses committed by armed
Anuak groups against the highlander population.In most cases, the precise dates and locations of interviews and other
identifying details have been withheld to protect the security of victims and
witnesses.

Recommendations

To the Government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

Take all necessary and appropriate steps,
including the issuance of clear public orders to the Ethiopian National Defense
Force (ENDF), to stop immediately the commission of crimes against humanity and
other human rights violations in Gambella.

Conduct an independent, impartial and public
investigation into human rights violations committed by ENDF forces in
Gambella.Ensure that the investigation
examines ENDF abuses that have occurred anywhere in Gambella at least from the
time of the December 2003 massacre up to the present.Provide protection for victims and witnesses
who come forward to participate in this investigation.

Investigate and prosecute ENDF personnel and
government officials at all levels who are alleged to have been involved in the
commission of crimes against humanity or other human rights violations in
Gambella.Suspend from duty all
personnel, including commanding officers, directly implicated in serious abuses
or culpable as a matter of command responsibility.Investigate in particular the commanding
officers of the ENDF garrisons near Illea, Pochalla and Gok Dipatch, as well as
federal security officials in Gambella.

Allow and facilitate full and independent access
by international humanitarian organizations, international and national human
rights monitors, journalists and donor government representatives to Anuak
communities in Gambella.

Provide appropriate human rights training to all
members of the Ethiopian armed forces.

Provide adequate and speedy compensation to
civilians who have suffered human rights abuse, theft or destruction of
property by ENDF forces.

Provide assistance for projects to assist rape
victims, who have special needs.Such
assistance should include outreach, medical services, and trauma counseling and
testing and access to anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy and treatment.

To the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping
Operations

Ensure that any peacekeepers provided by the
Ethiopian government for UN peacekeeping operations are vetted to ensure that
they have not been involved in the human rights violations committed in
Gambella or other regions of the country.

To Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights

Deploy significant numbers of human rights
monitors to the Gambella region to monitor, investigate and publicly report on
abuses against civilians by the ENDF, militias or armed groups.

To Donor Governments

Publicly insist that the Ethiopian government
conduct a thorough, public and independent investigation into ENDF abuses in
Gambella.Closely monitor the progress
of government investigations and take prompt and appropriate action in response
to their findings.

Call for the government to permit access to the
region to international humanitarian agencies, international and national human
rights monitors, the media and diplomatic representatives.

If they have not done so, make military
assistance to Ethiopia
contingent on the government's adherence to international human rights and
humanitarian law and exclude any assistance to units implicated in human rights
violations.All suppliers should
actively monitor the use of any weapons or non-lethal items to ensure they are
not being utilized to commit abuses.

If providing military assistance, pressure the
government to abide by its commitments under international law.Donor states should publicly condemn specific
violations, including the widespread enforced disappearances committed by
security forces, and urge the government to address them.

Demand that ENDF and government officials found
to have participated in ongoing human rights violations be held accountable.

To Anuak Political and Community Leaders

Publicly denounce violence directed against
highlanders.Take concrete actions to
prevent such violence and facilitate the prosecution of individuals who carry
it out.

Background and Context

Ethiopia's
Gambella People's NationalRegionalState
(Gambella) is a low-lying region roughly the size of Rwanda that sits along the Sudanese
border in the southwest of the country.It has an ethnically diverse population estimated to approach 220,000
people.[2]There are five ethnic groups that consider
themselves to be indigenous to the Gambella area-the Anuak (or Anywaa), Nuer,
Majangir, Opo and Komo.The Nuer and the
Anuak are the two largest groups in the region.The third-largest population group consists of people the indigenous
groups refer to as "highlanders," "gaala"
or "habasha," terms which in local
parlance group together all migrants from other parts of Ethiopia and
their descendants.[3]

Historically, Gambella has always been treated as a
backwater by the central government.In
recent years, however, the region has attracted a higher level of governmental
interest, largely because of its relative abundance of natural resources.Gambella is the best-watered region of Ethiopia and
has large tracts of uncultivated land along with deposits of gold and oil.Petronas, Malaysia's state-owned oil corporation, has
acquired exploration rights in Gambella, and China's Zhongyuan Petroleum
Exploration Bureau (ZPEB) has begun seismic exploration activities in Gambella
under a subcontract from Petronas.[4]In addition, Gambella's long and porous
border with Sudan
is a source of perennial concern to federal authorities.The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF)[5] managed to
infiltrate fighters into Ethiopia through Gambella in 2002, reportedly with the
help of the Eritrean government; forces led by a former Derg[6] official
have succeeded in destabilizing some areas along the Sudanese border; and the
Anuak-led Gambella People's Liberation Front (GPLF) has launched raids into
Gambella from bases in southern Sudan.

As recently as 1980, Gambella's Anuak population was by far
the largest ethnic group in the region and a majority of the total
population.This began to change very
quickly in the mid-1980s. Beginning in 1984, the Derg's forced resettlement
program generated a massive influx of some 60,000 highlanders to the region.[7]All of the resettlement villages were located
on land that the Anuak claimed as their own.At almost the same time, refugees from the Sudanese civil war began
fleeing into Gambella.[8]In addition to these large-scale influxes,
long-standing patterns of eastward migration among the Sudanese Nuer have led
to a steady increase in Gambella's Nuer population over the course of the past
century.The pace of Nuer immigration
into Gambella has been dramatically accelerated by the civil war in southern Sudan and by
the success many Nuer refugees have had in claiming Ethiopian citizenship and
settling permanently in Gambella.The
result has been that the Anuak are now a minority in what they regard as their
own land, and according to the most recent census figures, they are greatly
outnumbered by Gambella's Nuer population.[9]

These dramatic demographic changes are, to a large degree,
responsible for the persistent ethnic tensions and frequent explosions of
ethnic violence that have plagued Gambella since the fall of the Derg in
1991.The flow of non-Anuak migrants
into Gambella has led many Anuak to fear the erosion of their political power,
and some believe that the very survival of Anuak culture is at risk.Additionally, some traditionally Anuak lands
are now inhabited almost exclusively by Nuer and Anuak widely regard the
continual shrinking of their territory as a threatening development.[10]The most frequent outbreaks of ethnic violence
in Gambella have pitted the Anuak against the Nuer.This violence reached a bloody peak in 2002,
a year that saw over one hundred people killed in clashes that displaced
several thousand people.Violent Anuak-Nuer conflict subsided by late
2003, but the resulting respite was an extremely brief one, as ethnic conflict
between Gambella's Anuak and highlander communities had also been simmering
throughout this period.[11]Many Anuak bitterly resented the arrival of
the settlers brought to Gambella by the Derg, and in May 1991, groups of Anuak
villagers attacked and murdered large numbers of highlander farmers who had
been living alongside them near the town of Abobo.[12]More recently, in the past several years, a
number of ambushes attributed to armed Anuak have left scores of highlander
civilians dead.[13]

For the past few years, the Ethiopian military has
undertaken operations aimed at rooting out armed Anuak groups operating in
Gambella, some of which are based in southern Sudan.Military and government officials generally
refer to these groups as "shifta," an
Amharic word that can loosely be translated as "bandit."These Anuak fighters are not unified under
the banner of any one group and do not share a common set of goals.They include Sudan-based rebels fighting
against the Ethiopian government for Anuak "self-determination"; farmers
carrying out isolated revenge attacks against ENDF soldiers and highlander
civilians; and a small number of radicalized gunmen who seem to target the
highlander population as a whole.[14]One Anuak insurgent group, the Gambella
People's Liberation Front (GPLF), operates out of southern Sudan and has
staged a handful of attacks inside Gambella.[15]There is also reportedly at least one other
armed Anuak group operating in Gambella, composed of perhaps two dozen fighters
led by a small group of former regional police officers.[16]A Sudan-based insurgent group led by a former
Derg official named Thuwath Pal Chay, the Ethiopian Patriotic United Front
(EPUF), has also been active in the region.[17]The EPUF has engaged in sporadic but heavy
fighting with Ethiopian military forces and has occasionally managed to seize
control of villages along the Sudanese border.It is not known how frequently clashes between the Ethiopian army and
EUDF forces have been.The EPUF's
fighters are predominantly Nuer, as is Thuwath Pal himself, and the group
allegedly receives support from the Eritrean government.[18]Due to an almost complete lack of reliable
information and the impossibility of travel to much of Gambella due to security
concerns and travel restrictions, it is unclear how serious a threat these
armed groups have posed to the overall security situation in the region or how
frequent armed clashes with the military have been.It is clear however, that there has been some
fighting between armed groups of Anuak and military forces.In addition, highlander civilians continue to
be killed in ambushes staged by armed Anuak, although these attacks seem to
have become less frequent since the second half of 2004.

While fighting between insurgent forces and the Ethiopian
army may at times have risen to the level of armed conflict as defined under
international humanitarian law (the laws of war), the abuses covered in this
report, primarily by the army against Anuak civilians, have not been in the
context of an armed conflict.As such,
international human rights law, rather than international humanitarian law, is
primarily applicable.[19]

After the Ethiopian Peoples Democratic Revolutionary Front
(EPRDF) government took power in 1991, it handed control over Gambella's
regional government to the Gambella People's Liberation Movement (GPLM), an
Anuak-dominated group that had allied itself with the EPRDF in its war against
the Derg.[20]Political power in Gambella remained firmly
in Anuak hands until December 2003, but federal officials and many within
Gambella, including significant numbers of Anuak community leaders, continually
accused Anuak regional authorities of corruption and incompetence.Most glaringly, regional officials did almost
nothing to resolve Anuak-Nuer ethnic tensions or conflict.[21]Many within the highlander community
reportedly believed that Anuak regional authorities had no interest in putting
a stop to the attacks against highlander civilians, and the federal authorities
also came to suspect that leading Anuak politicians were actively collaborating
with the armed Anuak groups attacking highlander civilians.[22]The federal authorities imprisoned many Anuak
political leaders, and at least thirty prominent Anuak, including one former
regional president, are now in prison in Addis
Ababa.[23]Indeed, a substantial minority of Gambella's
educated Anuak elite have been imprisoned or forced into exile over the past
decade.Gambella currently has no
regional president and no Anuak representative in the House of People's
Representatives, as both have sought asylum abroad.[24]

The federal government reacted to its deteriorating
relations with Gambella's regional authorities by assuming an increasing degree
of control over regional affairs.[25]Since Gambella's regional president fled the
country in December 2003, executive power in Gambella has theoretically been
wielded by the acting regional president (formerly vice president), Ket Tuach,
a Nuer.But the federal government
said that in February 2003, the regional government "requested" direct federal
intervention in the region's affairs and since then, real power in the region
has been exercised by the federal government's Ministry of Federal Affairs.[26]

In addition to assuming de facto control over the regional
government, the federal government has stationed several thousand more ENDF
troops in Gambella since December 2003.[27]Almost all of those soldiers are highlanders
and identify themselves as such in the context of highlander-Anuak ethnic
conflict.[28]The military has established camps throughout
the region and conducts regular patrols throughout most predominantly Anuak
areas.The primary reason for the large
military presence in Gambella appears to be an effort to eliminate armed Anuak
groups in the region and assure the security of areas under exploration for
oil.[29]

The December 2003 Massacre

On December 13, 2003, in an apparent reprisal for a series
of ambushes of highlander civilians carried out by armed Anuak,[30] ENDF
soldiers and highlander civilians launched a brutal attack on Gambella town's
Anuak population.A large number of
troops from the ENDF's 43rd Division were in Gambella town when the
massacre began and Human Rights Watch estimates that over one hundred of them
participated in the massacre.[31]Adult Anuak men were the primary targets of
the violence but were not its only victims.Soldiers raped several Anuak women, over four hundred Anuak houses were
burned to the ground and huge numbers of civilians fled into the forest or took
shelter in compounds belonging to two of the town's largest churches. The
commander of Gambella town's military garrison, Major Tsegaye Beyene, was in
Gambella town throughout the massacre and took no apparent action to stop it;
indeed, he appears to have directly taken part in the violence.

On the morning of Saturday, December 13, 2003, a car
carrying several employees of the federal government's Administration for
Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA), a driver and apolice escort was ambushed some thirty kilometers outside of
Gambella town.All eight of the car's
occupants were killed in the attack and their bodies were badly mutilated.[32]All of the victims were highlanders.This attack was the immediate spark for the
massacre that began later that day.At
the time of the ambush, the ARRA staff had been on their way to visit the site
of a proposed new camp for Sudanese Nuer refugees.[33]While the individuals who carried out the
attack have reportedly never been caught, it is widely assumed both within and
outside of Gambella that the ambush was the work of an armed Anuak group or
Anuak shifta.At the time, many Anuak were incensed that
the government was planning to open a fourth camp for Sudanese refugees in addition
to the three that already existed on what they regard as Anuak land.[34]

Word of the attack reached Gambella town shortly after the
ambush, and as the news spread a large crowd of highlander civilians gathered
in the center of town to discuss and protest the killings.[35]A short while later, some of the soldiers who
had been sent to the scene of the ambush returned to town with the eight
victims' bodies.By the time the vehicle
carrying the corpses reached the center of Gambella town, it was part of a
convoy of at least nine vehicles accompanied by crowds of highlanders.The convoy proceeded directly to the regional
council building, where military personnel displayed the mutilated bodies to
the increasingly emotional crowd.[36]The crowd, along with the bodies, then
reportedly moved to the police station.

The commercial center of Gambella town.On December 13, 2003, ENDF soldiers and local
highlanders massacred hundreds of Anuak civilians living in the town. 2004 Human Rights Watch

Witnesses to these events describe an atmosphere of anger
and tension that grew considerably worse after the eight bodies were shown to
the crowd.[37]Scattered gunshots were heard throughout the
town and large groups of obviously angry soldiers and highlander civilians were
seen moving through the streets.One
Anuak witness to the scene described what he saw as he drove through the town
that morning:

We reached the Mobil fueling
station but couldn't pass because of the crowds of highlanders shouting,
weeping and wailing.There was a lorry
full of soldiers, well armed, and so we turned the car and diverted our
route.In town we could not see an Anuak
moving and we were scared.I asked the
driver to take me home, but we couldn't reach there because there were soldiers
marching and running throughout the town.They were moving in all different directionsI walked home [and] saw
some Anuak I knew.They said the soldiers
had chased them with guns away from a hotel they were walking by.I said we must go home or they may arrest or
beat us.They took my advice and so we
walked home together.[38]

Many other Anuak also began moving towards their homes for
safety.Some families locked themselves
inside their homes hoping to wait things out; several witnesses described
feeling nervous but doubting that anything serious would happen.[39]

Between noon and one o'clock, some witnesses reported that
they heard what sounded like a large crowd shouting and cheering along with
bursts of gunfire emanating from somewhere near the police station.[40]Within several minutes of this commotion,
groups of highlander civilians armed with machetes, axes, sticks and iron bars
and accompanied by armed and uniformed ENDF soldiers descended upon several
Anuak neighborhoods.These groups varied
in size from roughly five to thirty.Witnesses with whom Human Rights Watch spoke said that groups of
soldiers and highlanders moved systematically from house to house searching for
Anuak men.[41]While generally leaving women and children
alive, the attackers killed Anuak men after pulling them from their homes or
running them down as they tried to flee.One young Anuak man caught up in the first moments of the massacre
recalled the terror and confusion that ensued:

I saw people running here and
there.Seeing people running, I also
ran, knowing nothing of what was happening.All of a sudden I saw and heard the government soldiers shooting.On hearing the bullets, I ran even
faster.Because there were so many
people running here and there we collided and I fell down.I started to see people who were fallen down
dead and so I got up and started running again.I ran to the edge of town and hid myself under a bush.I stayed there for a long time.From my hiding place I saw people being shot,
running and being killed.The noise was
very great.

He remained hidden for some time and saw his neighbors'
homes burned as they tried desperately to escape:

After a long time I saw one
man crawling.I tried to identify
him.He was covered in blood.On looking further, I found out that he was
Abraham.I knew him well because we lived close by and used to see each other
often.I wanted to help him but I failed to do so because I was afraid.Following that I heard a very big blast.Then I saw a big fire burning in a
house.I saw a group of people running
towards the river, followed by soldiers and a group of people with
machetes.Then I buried my head and
didn't see anything else.I
panicked.I was too afraid to look up
anymore[42]

One middle-aged woman was inside of her home with her family
when a group of soldiers and highlander civilians arrived.She described what happened after her husband
went outside to confront them:

When they came we were in the
house with our children.My husband, they
shot him [in front of our home]....After he was fallen my son could not hide
himself anymore and he went out to see his father.They killed him as
well.It was the military with guns and
lots of our highlander neighbors.My son
came out because he knew some of the highlander people very well and he tried
to say, "Why are you doing this thing?"They just cut him with axes and other tools.He thought that because he had been together
with them as neighbors and friends they could listen to him.My eldest daughter
was crying, saying "Why did you kill my father and brother?"So they came and they beat her with
sticks.I took a stick also and I tried
to beat them but they just said, "Let us leave them."Until now my daughter does not work.She is broken.She was a student and used to carry water and
crush maize, but she cannot do anything now.[43]

Where people refused to come out of their homes, their
assailants battered the doors down or set the grass roofs of their small,
circular tukuls ablaze.When the terrified inhabitants of burning
houses tried to escape through windows or doors, they were either shot by
groups of waiting soldiers or set upon with machetes, clubs and other weapons
by highlander civilians.Several larger
houses with tin roofs proved more difficult to break into or burn, so soldiers
drove out their occupants by throwing grenades through the windows.The house of a prominent Anuak pastor named
Okwier Oletho was attacked in this way.His house was a large rectangular structure with a tin roof that was
divided into several rooms.At least a
dozenpeople had sought refuge
there.After a group of soldiers and
highlander civilians surrounded the house, a soldier broke open a window and
tossed a grenade through it into the living room.As fire spread throughout the house, the
people inside began scrambling through the windows.Soldiers shot and killed most of the men who
came through the windows, some of whom were picked off before they could even
start running.Pastor Okwier was among
the dead; after he escaped through a window, a group of highlander civilians
chased him down and murdered him with machetes and clubs.[44]

-

Pastor Okwier Oletho's mother-in-law standing next to his
grave near the ruins of his home in Gambella town.ENDF soldiers and highlander townspeople
killed Pastor Okwier when they attacked his home during the December 2003
massacre. 2004 Human Rights Watch

Most of the violence took place in a few neighborhoods where
most of Gambella town's Anuak population is concentrated.The worst-affected neighborhoods were
Omminingah, Owalingah, Tier Kidi and Addis Zefer.In other parts of the town, soldiers and
highlanders positioned themselves to intercept some of the people running away
from the besieged Anuak neighborhoods.One man who was hidden in the house of a highlander friend described
what took place in an intersection a short distance from that house:

They were in a big group
sitting there waiting for people because Anuak had to cross through that area
to get to Anuak villages.I could see
through the window. I saw about seven people being killed with my eyes.Four were knifed and beaten by highlanders
and two were shot by the military.One man was shouting, "I am a Nuer, not an
Anuak," but they recognized him as Anuak.One [man], the soldiers tied his
hands to his legs and put him on the road and then ran him over with a military
truck.This person had been
running.The soldiers caught him,
between five and ten of them.They tied
his hands and legs and were saying, "Why do you want to shoot him?We can kill him in another way instead."There were some highlander children there and
they were crying, saying, "Don't kill him, don't kill him!"They [the soldiers] put him on the road and
they yelled, "Go over him, go over him!" and then the truck ran him over
once.Then the soldiers and highlanders
clapped and cheered together.[45]

The Anuak neighborhood of Tier Kidi in Gambella
town.Many of Tier Kidi's residents
sought refuge from the December 2003 massacre in the nearby compound of the
Catholic church. 2004 Human Rights
Watch

ENDF soldiers raped several Anuak women during the
massacre.One woman whose house was
invaded by a group of ten soldiers and highlander civilians described what
happened to her family:

They threw stones through the
window and one of them hit me.I didn't open the door for them and so they
broke into the house by smashing the door.First after they smashed the door
they came in and took a thirteen-year-old boy together with my son and took
them outside.My son was thirteen
also.Then they shot the other boy-it
was soldiers who shot him.Because my
son seemed shorter than the other boy they ordered him back to me.I had fallen
down and was bleeding because of the rock that came through the window.They raped my sister while I was lying on the
ground.What I saw was the soldiers
going and lying on my sister.I saw all
of them going to her, one by one.Because their attention had shifted to her I saw a chance to escape and
so I got up and ran out the door.[46]

Another woman, a primary school teacher, was alone at her
school with two female colleagues when a group of soldiers approached them:

We knew them.We used to prepare coffee and invite these
soldiers to come and drink with us before December 13 under a big tree by the
school.It was Saturday but three of us teachers were at school-one highlander
and two Anuak.They took the highlander
teacher away.They took [the other Anuak
teacher] and I into a room used for resting by the teachers.After they took us into the room, they raped
us, me along with my friend.My
[highlander] colleague was crying, "You people can't believe in God, why are
you doing this thing!"So they beat her even though she is a highlander.[47]

The officer who was in command of the military forces in
Gambella town at the time of the massacre, MajorTsegaye Beyene, was present in Gambella town throughout the entire
massacre.Okello Akway, an Anuak who was
then Gambella's Regional President, was with Tsegaye throughout the day on
December 13, trapped in the military barracks in the center of Gambella town
because he was afraid to venture into the chaos outside.According to Okello, at no point during that
day did Tsegaye make any apparent attempt to stop the killing.Okello said that when he challenged Tsegaye
to intervene and stop the killing, Tsegaye responded, "Are we the ones killing
the people?It is the Anuak who are all
butchers.""After that," Okello said, "I
simply became quiet."[48]After the massacre, Okello became
increasingly afraid for his own life and eventually fled across the Sudanese
border on foot before seeking asylum in Norway.[49]

One woman who was detained by the police early on December
13 told Human Rights Watch that she was raped bya senior officer
while in ENDF custody.In the early
hours of the afternoon, while the massacre was raging throughout the town, ENDF
personnel transferred her from the police station to the barracks near the center
of Gambella town.She described what
happened there:

At night, [some soldiers]
started saying that I am a member of the organization that attacked the
car.They said I am a cashier of that
organization.They also asked a lot of questions
about my brother because they thought that maybe he is also one of them.I said I do not know this organization and am
not a member of any organization.They mistreated me because they said I am one
of those people.They started beating
me, and then [officer's name deleted] raped me.I was taken to his room by two soldiers.I refused and quarreled with these people and they started beating me
again.Then they took me to his room and
I quarreled and fought with them.They
put a gun to my throat and said, "Be silent."It happened there, two times.It
was [the officer] both times with his colleague.[The next day] they took me to the main
barracks far from the townI was kept in one room and I was mistreated there as
well.[50]

The violence continued throughout the day on December 13 and
came to a halt at around sunset.On the
morning of the fourteenth, the killing began anew and continued until that
evening.Some witnesses reported that
the attacks continued throughout the day of the fifteenth as well.By all accounts, the violence came to a
permanent halt by the evening of Monday, December 15.By then at least 440 Anuak houses had been
destroyed; most of those had been burned, while others had been blown apart by
grenades.[51]The Anuak neighborhoods of Omminigah and
Owalingah were almost completely razed and most of their inhabitants were left
homeless.[52]

Hundreds of Anuak civilians fled into the bush on December
13 to escape the massacre.Some returned
that evening, only to be forced to flee a second time when the violence erupted
again the next morning.[53]Others spent several days hiding in isolated
stands of trees several kilometers outside of town before returning home,
generally without access to food or clean water.In addition, 382 Anuak sought refuge behind
the walls of the Catholic Church compound and well over a thousand took shelter
in the compound of the Mekene Yesus church.[54]Most stayed for roughly one week and some
stayed for two or even three weeks.[55]

The government has sought to downplay the number of Anuak
civilians killed in the December massacre.A government-appointed Commission of Inquiry found that sixty-five
people were killed.[56]That figure is clearly a gross underestimate;
the twenty-four eyewitnesses to the massacre interviewed by Human Rights Watch
alone witnessed more killings than this.An independent inquiry conducted by the Ethiopian Human Rights Council,
the country's leading human rights advocacy organization, a week after the
massacre estimated that more than 300 Anuak had lost their lives in the
violence.[57]Anuak groups have compiled a list of 424
people they say were killed.Based on
the interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with eyewitnesses to the massacre,
many of whom lost family, friends and neighbors in the attack, as well as Anuak
community leaders and other knowledgeable sources, Human Rights Watch believes
that the 424 figure is the most accurate.

Case Studies

Since December 2003, ENDF forces in Gambella have committed
widespread human rights violations against Anuak communities throughout the
region.These abuses have included
large-scale attacks on villages, extrajudicial killings, rape, beatings and
torture and destruction of property and looting.Some of the most egregious examples of these
abuses are presented here in case studies of three Anuak communities.As documented below, the testimony gathered
by Human Rights Watch evidences a similar pattern of abuse that occurred
throughout Gambella in late 2003 and 2004.

Ethiopian Army Raid against Anuak Civilians in
Pinyudo

Pinyudo lies roughly 110 kilometers to the south of Gambella
town, close to the banks of the GiloRiver.It is the largest predominantly Anuak town in
Gambella.The town's population includes
a sizeable minority of highlanders but neighborhoods are largely segregated
along ethnic lines.

On the afternoon of December 16 or 17, 2003, a few days
after the massacre in Gambella town, Ethiopian soldiers stationed near Pinyudo
conducted a raid on the town's Anuak neighborhoods.Pinyudo's Anuak population was already on
edge because soldiers had shot and killed a young man named Akurkwar Bok Olay
several days earlier in the center of town and refused to offer any explanation
for the killing.[58]However, word of the violence in Gambella town
had not yet reached Pinyudo and the attack caught most people completely by
surprise.[59]

It is not clear how the attack in Pinyudo began.Some witnesses later heard that there had
been a clash between military forces and a group of armed Anuak just outside of
the town at around the time the violence erupted.However it started, the attack quickly
evolved into a destructive assault on Pinyudo's Anuak neighborhoods.Witnesses report that panic gripped the
town's Anuak population as soldiers moved into Anuak neighborhoods,
deliberately setting fire to houses and firing at fleeing Anuak residents.Hundreds of families fled as the soldiers
descended on their homes, most of them in the direction of the GiloRiver.As the smoke from burning houses filled the
air above the town, many of the fleeing persons swam across the river to hide
in the tall, dense grass that lay beyond the opposite bank.[60]

The vast majority of the people who fled managed to escape
safely into the bush.A small number of
people sought refuge in their homes or in the houses of neighbors instead of
fleeing, however; at least two of them were reportedly burned alive inside
their homes.[61]One thirty-two-year-old man who was hiding in
the house of a friend described seeing soldiers loot and burn all of the houses
around him, including his own.He then
watched as a friend of his ran out from a neighboring house after soldiers set
fire to its grass roof; a soldier shot and killed him before he had managed to
make it more than a few meters from the door.[62]

Late in the day, the violence subsided.Wereda[63]
officials arrived on the scene and began moving along the banks of the GiloRiver
with loudspeakers, announcing that the situation had been brought under control
and urging people to return to their homes.[64]Many people were skeptical and remained
hidden, but a large group of people emerged from the grass and began making
their way back across the river.As they
stepped into the water, soldiers on the opposite bank opened fire
indiscriminately.One sixty-year-old man
whose two sons were cut down in the water described watching them die:

They were moving along the
bank calling, "Come back, there is peace now."[My sons] were in a hurry to go back and see their homes.When they came crossing the river they were
killed.I saw them fall.I saw the
[members of the] defense forces who shot them.I immediately recognized them when they had fallen and I ran to them.After the death of these people and my two
sons, the people still on the bank ran away to the forest.I had nothing to do-I had already died.When the people ran away I stayed behind.

According to my culture, the
first person to die should be the old person.But these were my two sons.[65]

Human Rights Watch was able to document twelve killings of
Anuak residents by soldiers in Pinyudo town during the course of the day; the
actual total may be higher.

Soldiers also looted at least one clinic and ransacked a
junior secondary school.[66]The attackers also disabled a community
grinding mill that had been operated collectively by Anuak households; it had
not been repaired at the time of Human Rights Watch's visit to the town.[67]

-

ENDF soldiers deliberately disabled this grinding mill
during the attack in Pinyudo.The
townspeople who once made use of it had not been able to repair it at the time
of Human Rights Watch's visit. 2004
Human Rights Watch

By the close of the day, the violence came to an end, and
over the next few days many people began returning home. Most found that they had been left homeless;
nearly every house in the most densely populated Anuak neighborhoods had been
razed and many had been looted.Well-informed regional officials speaking on condition of anonymity
estimated that well over 1000 homes were destroyed in total.[68]The officer then in command of military
forces in the area around Pinyudo, Captain Amare, initially claimed to regional
officials sent to investigate the destruction that only a handful of houses
were destroyed.He later admitted that a
large number of homes were burned but said that all of them were destroyed
accidentally in the course of his soldiers' efforts to fend off an attack by
Anuak shifta.[69]As most of the grass around Pinyudo town had
already been cleared by ENDF soldiers, there was not enough available to build
roofs for reconstructed houses.As a
result, hundreds of families spent months living under makeshift shelters
covered with plastic sheeting.

Ethiopian Army Raids against Anuak Villages in Tedo
Kebele

Tedo is a rural kebele[70]
in the Jor region of Gilo wereda that encompasses several remote Anuak
villages.Three of the kebele's villages
were attacked by ENDF forces over the course of roughly three weeks beginning
in March 2004.In each of three surprise
raids, villagers were forced to flee into the forest as soldiers burned and
looted their homes behind them.At least
seventeen Anuak civilians were killed in total.[71]

The first of the three attacks took place in a village
called Bad Kut.In the mid-afternoon, a
large group of soldiers descended upon the village, catching its population
completely off guard.One witness
described the first moments of the attack and its aftermath in some detail:

I was there when they
arrived.People were just sitting and
the women were preparing food.The men,
we were just sitting and talking.We
didn't see them right when they came-we heard guns shooting and when we looked
we saw that it was soldiers who were shooting.After the shooting we had to think of running and so we didn't see what
they did.But after we escaped we could
see houses burning and the whole village on fire.When we went back we saw burned houses and
our things were broken.Cattle and
property were taken and goats and sheep were killed.Also the pots we use to store grain and
powdered maize were broken.Even the
shells we use to eat food were broken.My house was there and it was burnt
down.Bad Kut was fifty houses-it is one of the bigger villages in Tedo.Almost all of the houses were burnt
down.Only a few remained.[72]

Other witnesses gave similar accounts to Human Rights
Watch.In addition to looting and
burning at least several dozen homes and destroying grain stores, the attackers
reportedly looted the village's primary school and stole the tin roofing from
the church.Between five and eleven
people who did not manage to escape were shot and killed as the soldiers
entered the village.[73]

The second attack took place one to two weeks later in the village of Cham, a small village roughly three
hours on foot from Bad Kut.Villagers
there said that they had been nervous since hearing news of the attack on Bad
Kut, but the attack on Cham nevertheless also caught them by surprise.According to some witnesses this was because
the attacking soldiers approached from an unexpected direction that allowed
them to conceal their approach.As in
Bad Kut, the villagers fled as the soldiers drew near the village.At least five people were shot from behind
and killed as they ran.The remaining
villagers fled into the forest and returned several hours later to find many of
their homes destroyed and most of their possessions looted.One survivor of the attack recalled:

Our houses and all of the
grain stores were burned.All of the
cooking pots and dishes were destroyed.They took all of the cattle and sheep and goats.We saw this when we returned.Almost all the village was burned down; it
was only this village that was attacked.My house was burned.They looted
everything.[74]

One to two weeks after the attack on Cham, the military
conducted a raid on the nearby village
of Abunjay.The soldiers entered the village in the early
hours of the morning, and again succeeded in catching the population by
surprise.One witness recounted what
took place:

There was a little bit of
rain.As the rain stopped early in the
morning they came and started shooting at people.The people escaped and ran away.I ran also.When we were running they were chasing us.They burned down the whole
village and they took everything.They
destroyed everything like cattle, sheep, goats, grain stores and the powdered
maize in big jars.Two old women were
burned in their houses.I saw their
bodies in the houses after we returned.We could only recognize them by their homes-you could not even tell who
they were.[75]

At least seven Anuak residents were killed in the
attack.

Anuak villagers from these three villages told Human Rights
Watch that after the third attack many people in Tedo left their homes and
crossed into southern Sudan
as refugees.One man from Abunjay said
that after the attack on his village, "all of the villagers went to Pochalla
and there was no more life in Tedo."[76]

Witnesses to the attacks in Tedo kebele were at a loss in
trying to explain them but believed that their substantial herds of cattle,
sheep and goats may have been one motivating factor.In all three villages, the attacking soldiers
rounded up and stole entire herds of livestock.Several months after these attacks, Human Rights Watch researchers
observed several dozen cattle that had been taken from villages in Tedo grazing
outside of Pinyudo town, watched over by a young soldier.Soldiers reportedly sold some of the stolen
cattle to buyers in town and used the remainder to supplement their diet.[77]

There have been no reported raids on villages in Tedo kebele
since March 2004, but ENDF soldiers continue to commit abuses against the local
population.In two separate incidents in
May, women walking alone along the road were caught and gang-raped by soldiers
in ENDF patrols.[78]In a third and especially gruesome reported
incident, a group of soldiers captured a group of six women and two men who
were walking together in the countryside.The soldiers cut the throats of the two men, Okwier Omot and Manyu Chan,
while the women watched and then raped all six of them.[79]

Ethiopian Army Abuses against Anuak Civilians in Gok

Gok Jinjor and Gok Dipatch are kebeles within Gilo
wereda.The population of both kebeles
is overwhelmingly Anuak.The Ethiopian
military has committed human rights abuses against Anuak civilians living
throughout this area over the course of the past year.Since the establishment of a permanent
military camp in Gok Dipatch in July or August 2004, however, these abuses have
grown considerably more frequent and serious.

Prior to the stationing of a permanent military garrison in
Gok Dipatch, military patrols were frequently sent to Gok from the garrison
near Pinyudo to search for shifta and
illegal weapons.Soldiers frequently
detained and beat any Anuak men they came across in their patrols and
occasionally looted Anuak villages.[80]ENDF soldiers also raped some Anuak women who
they caught alone outside of their villages.[81]

In July or August 2004, the military established a permanent
camp in Gok Dipatch.Several individuals
from villages in Gok told Human Rights Watch that their problems with ENDF
soldiers had grown much worse since then.One man who had recently fled a patrol approaching his village and spent
that night in the forest said that since the arrival of this garrison, "things
have become very serious.There is lots
of raping and if you accidentally meet them on your way to another village they
will beat you.So people are always
ready-your clothes are always in a bag and ready for running."[82]

Patrols from the camp move between all of the Anuak villages
in Gok Dipatch and Gok Jinjor kebeles.These patrols conduct frequent searches of Anuak houses, often
destroying or looting property in the process.One man from a village near Gok Dipatch reported to Human Rights Watch
that a patrol had come to his village, accused the people there of hiding
bullets in the jars of powdered maize the community had stored from their last
harvest, and poured all of it out into the dirt.[83]Several villagers from Gok Dipatch said that
the soldiers seemed especially fond of the honey many households gather to
supplement their diet and would steal it whenever they come across it while
searching a house for weapons.As one
local man said, "Because everything is in their hands, they take whatever they
want."[84]

At least ten Anuak civilians have been shot and killed by
ENDF soldiers from the Gok Dipatch garrison since December 2003.Many of those were killed while attempting to
flee a group of approaching soldiers.The most notorious of the killings in Gok was the murder of Oballa
Obang,[85] an
elderly and widely respected village chairman from Gok Jinjor who had been an
active community leader since the days of Haile
Selassie, Ethiopia's
last emperor.The commander of the
military garrison in Gok Dipatch had called a meeting of community leaders in
Gok Jinjor; the main purpose of this meeting was to demand that Oballa respond
to accusations that he had been furnishing food and other material support to
Anuak shifta.Oballa sent a message saying that he was sick
and did not attend the meeting.After
the meeting adjourned, a group of soldiers went to his house.According to witnesses, they told him that
they did not believe he was actually ill and arrested him.Oballa was then taken to the campus of a
nearby school, which the ENDF garrison was using as its headquarters.According to one eyewitness, the soldiers present
began threatening to kill Oballa.He
became frightened and tried to run away; two or more soldiers shot him in the
back and he died almost instantly.The
next day, villagers followed a trail of blood to find his body buried in a
shallow grave in the forest not far from the school.[86]

Human Rights Watch interviewed several villagers from
communities near the Gok Dipatch garrison, and all of them said that women from
their villages had been raped by soldiers stationed there.Some of them were raped on the roads; in
other cases soldiers have followed women who venture outside of the village to
fetch water and attacked them there.One
man from a village in Gok Dipatch kebele called Che Aba described what happened
to one of his relatives:

She was trying to go and fetch
water at night; there were some soldiers guarding the way.They asked her her name and she told
them.They said, "Where are you
going?"She said she was getting
water.He asked her, "Why are you going
at night?"She said, "I want to get some
water for tomorrow morning."Then she
left, but one of the soldiers followed her.After she fetched the water and was trying to go back he took the
jerrican from her and did not want her to go.She cried out, but no one went to see what had happened.He then forced her.She left everything there, even the jerrican,
and came home.When she came back she
told us this thing.[87]

Officers from the Gok Dipatch garrison regularly require
villagers to attend meetings, but they are not responsive when those present
raise complaints about the soldiers' behavior.One man from a village close to the garrison said:

They have many meetings.They surround the village and say, "We want
to meet with you." In these meetings they say, "Now we have to talk about
peace and how peace will come."People
respond, "But we had peace when you were not here."All these months we are always having
meetings with them, but they are not meetings for something to happen.They are just for confusing people.[We] tell them the same things in all the
meetings but nothing comes of it.We are
fed up with all of these meetings.[88]

In one meeting a village chairman demanded that the officers
in command of the garrison do something to stop soldiers from raping women from
his village:

The chairman raised these
issues with the military at this meeting.At this meeting the military was mainly discussing how to bring about
peace.They said that they were there
for the peace and security of the villagers.The chairman said, "No, your being here is a problem.You are not living in peace, you are raping
women"-he was even mentioning their names-"and beating people in the
villages."They were just telling him
that what he said is something which could be wrong or not correct.They said, "You have to tell us the names of
the soldiers who raped these women."But
[the soldiers] all look the same.[89]

In another incident, a woman from a village near the Gok
Dipatch garrison was attacked and raped by four soldiers in the early hours of
the evening.She screamed, several
people from the village came running to see what was happening, and the
soldiers fled.The next day, community
leaders went to the garrison to report the incident and were told that it would
be investigated.Villagers interviewed
by Human Rights Watch said that a short while later, a letter from the
garrison's commanding officer arrived in the village.The letter said that since the soldiers in
the garrison were difficult to control, the best way for the community to avoid
problems in the future would be to make sure that women did not leave the village
unaccompanied.The soldiers responsible
for the rape that had been reported were never punished.[90]

Additional Ethiopian Military Abuses against Anuak
Civilians

The incidents described above are only a small piece of the
pattern of rights violations committed by the Ethiopian army against the Anuak
population in Gambella.Human Rights
Watch examined numerous other cases of abuses since the December 2003
massacre.These include further and
continuing raids on Anuak neighborhoods and villages that have left a trail of
death, rape, looting and destruction.ENDF forces have also committed widespread human rights abuses against
individual Anuak civilians throughout Gambella.These typically occur when soldiers pass through Anuak communities in
rural areas or encounter Anuaks in the countryside.In many areas, most notably around Gok and
Jor in Gilo wereda, abuses are ongoing and frequent.

Extrajudicial Killings

Human Rights Watch documented 104 extrajudicial killings of
Anuak civilians by ENDF forces in December 2003 and throughout 2004, not
including the more than 400 victims of the December 2003 massacre.[91]Many
of those killings occurred during attacks on Anuak villages, while others
followed encounters between groups of soldiers and Anuak men in the
countryside.

As documented below, ENDF forces have attacked Anuak
neighborhoods in some of the region's largest towns and have also raided
several villages in Okuna, Abodo and Powatalam kebeles between February and
September 2004.In these attacks,
soldiers killed dozens of Anuak residents, many of whom were shot while trying
to flee.

On the last day of January or at the beginning of February
2004, ENDF soldiers and highlander civilians carried out an attack against the
Anuak population in Dimma, a town in the extreme south of Gambella.This violence was in apparent reprisal for a
bloody attack on a highlander community of artisanal miners carried out by
armed Anuak outside of Dimma on January 30, 2004, described below. The
violence began at around 11 a.m., when soldiers and highlander civilians stoned
to death a student named Ochalla Chan in Dimma.[92]Throughout the afternoon, mobs chased scores
of Anuak civilians from their homes and attacked them in the streets.ENDF soldiers shot and killed several unarmed
Anuaks while others were set upon with machetes and clubs by highlander
civilians.[93]One thirty-five-year-old civil servant
stepped outside of his home to see what was happening when he heard the first
gunshots and watched a group of soldiers shoot and kill a man and a woman in
the street near his home.[94]Another man told Human Rights Watch that he
barricaded himself inside his house along with his wife and infant son when the
violence began and some time later he heard screams and gunfire very close
by.When he ventured outside several
hours later, he saw the bodies of one of his neighbors, a mechanic named Omot,
and a woman he did not recognize splayed across the ground near Omot's
home.Both bodies had bullet wounds and
had been badly mutilated.[95]

In February or March[96]
2004, several dozen soldiers attacked and looted a village called Abodo in the
Jor region of Gilo wereda.At least
seven people were killed, most of them as they fled in the direction of the
nearby river.One young man described
how the attacking soldiers killed one of his neighbors:

They came with trucks and when
they saw the village they dropped out of them and came on foot.We only saw them when they were near to the
village.As soon as we saw them we all
started running-we all knew about Gambella town.They didn't ask any questions but started
shooting.We ran into the bush, crossed
the river and started running again.I saw them kill one man.He is not normal-he has a physical
problem.When we started running he
could not run fast and could not get far from the village.They shot him and stood on top of him.He didn't die immediately.His relatives were trying to carry him after
the soldiers shot him but then they left him and ran away.[97]

The soldiers occupied the village for several days after the
attack.

Early one morning in late February or early March,[98] ENDF
soldiers descended upon Anuak neighborhoods in Abobo, a town that lies forty
kilometers to the south of the regional capital, burning homes and firing
indiscriminately at panicked Anuak civilians.At least fifteen Anuak residents lost their lives, most of them cut down
by gunfire as they tried to escape.[99]One fifty-year-old woman described how she
fell behind the younger and stronger members of her family as they all fled in
the initial moments of the attack."We
saw three groups of soldiers coming through the bush chasing us," she said."There were many guns from that side and this
side.The soldiers were shouting, 'Kill
them!'"One man who was running several
paces ahead of her was shot and killed just before she escaped into a dense
tangle of trees."He was a bit ahead of
me when he was shot and after he fell I passed his body," she said."I heard the gun and then he just fell."[100]Another woman was running towards the shelter
of a stand of nearby trees when the woman running next to her was shot and
killed by a soldier some distance behind them.She continued running and hid herself in the hollow trunk of a dead
tree, only to find that her hiding place was home to a colony of bees.A group of some fifteen soldiers appeared
nearby before she could extricate herself, so she was forced to remain still
and silent until they passed while the insects stung her all over her body.[101]

ENDF forces have carried out similar attacks in Anuak
villages scattered throughout Gambella.In an attack that completely destroyed the Anuak village of Okuna Pino
near Abobo in March or April of 2004, soldiers killed at least fourteen Anuak
civilians.[102]One blind woman named Agwa Nugat could not
escape and was burned alive inside her home when soldiers set fire to the
village.[103]In Powatalam kebele, ENDF troops attacked the
villages of Poljai, Jaru and Tirol in August
and September 2004 and killed at least two Anuak civilians.When ENDF soldiers arrived in Tirol, they shot a man they encountered on the outskirts
of the village.His young wife, who
watched him die, was at a loss to explain the killing.She said simply, "They met and they shot
him.No words were exchanged.When I saw him fall, I ran away to the
forest."[104]When they entered the village, soldiers
accused its inhabitants of sheltering Anuak shifta
before setting fire to their homes and attacking some of the fleeing villagers.[105]

Other Extrajudicial Killings

Ethiopian soldiers have also killed Anuak civilians in
isolated incidents that did not involve attacks on larger towns or
villages.Many Anuak farmers work fields
located some distance from the villages they live in, and Human Rights Watch
received several reports of military patrols killing farmers on their way to or
from their fields.Late one afternoon in
October 2004, a young man named Ojulu Ochala was killed as he walked home from
his fields near Okuna Pino.An ENDF
patrol had surrounded the village as they prepared to move into and search it;
startled by Ojulu's approach from the other direction, one or more soldiers
opened fire on him when he stepped into view.One witness to the killing said:

We were following him, walking
together from the farm to the village.We were together at first but then he pulled ahead of us.It was late in the afternoon and we ran into
the military by accident.They just shot
him without asking any questions.After he was shot he fell down and then we
ran.They ordered the old men to throw him away without burying him.So they did this, they threw him in the bush
somewhat far from the villagebut then after the soldiers left they buried him.[106]

Many Anuak villagers told Human Rights Watch that ENDF
personnel generally offered no explanations for such killings to relatives and
affected communities.One farmer from Tirol village in Powatalam kebele said that a passing
patrol shot and killed a man from the village named Owat Ogala in January
2004.The soldiers came to notify the
villagers that they had killed the man but did not explain why they had done
it, saying only, "there is someone there.Go and bury him."[107]

The military routinely conducts patrols through remote
stretches of uninhabited forest near Anuak villages.The objective of these patrols is purportedly
to ensure security in rural areas and root out armed Anuak shifta whomsoldiersbelieve to be hiding in isolated
villages and in the bush.[108]Often, however, ENDF forces appear to make no
effort to distinguish male Anuak civilians from the shifta they claim to be hunting.Unarmed young men have frequently been shot at and in many cases killed
while traveling between villages, and many ENDF patrols seem to view any Anuak
civilian who runs away from them as a legitimate target.Many Anuak men from rural villages told Human
Rights Watch that they make a habit of fleeing whenever they see or hear
soldiers approaching along secondary roads or trails; two said that they had
been shot at by soldiers who spotted them from a distance as they tried to run
into the grass.[109]Human Rights Watch spoke with one man who
narrowly escaped being shot while walking to Pinyudo from a village in Jor in
October 2004."Of course," he said, "on
these roads when you see the military you have to run if you see them
first.So I ran and they started
shooting at me but they couldn't hit me and I ran into the bush."[110]

Rape

Encouraged by a climate of near-total impunity, ENDF
personnel have raped Anuak women in and around villages throughout
Gambella.Some of these rapes have been
committed in the course of broader attacks on Anuak civilian populations, but
most have not.The majority of the rapes
reported to Human Rights Watch occurred when women were attacked by military
personnel when they were outside of their villages.Anuak communities near ENDF garrisons
experience the most frequent abuses.

The deep and lasting stigma associated with rape in Anuak society
drives many Anuak rape survivors to conceal attacks even from their
families.For the same reason, while
most of the Anuak villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Gambella said
that ENDF soldiers had raped women from their communities in 2004, some of them
were not willing to discuss specific cases in any detail.This was true of men as well as women; one
man from a village near Gok Dipatch explained his refusal to discuss a number
of rapes that had reportedly taken place in his village by saying that, "even
your wife, they can come and take her and you cannot tell it to another
person.If you tell another person you
are spoiling the name of your wife."[111]As a result, Human Rights Watch was only able
to obtain testimony about some of the rapes that have occurred since December
2003 in surveyed communities.

Human Rights Watch has documented many rapes of Anuak women
committed by ENDF soldiers along isolated roads in Gambella. One woman told
Human Rights Watch that a group of twelve ENDF soldiers gang raped her on a
road between Gok Jinjor and Gok Dipatch in Gilo wereda sometime in the first
few months of 2004.She said:

I was on my way to a nearby
village andI was caught by soldiers.They beat me and raped me at that time.There were twelve soldiers and all twelve of them raped me.They kept me for three hours.[After this] I became very exhausted and I
was bleeding.From Gok Jinjor to Gok
Dipatch usually takes two hours, but after I faced this problem, it took six
hours.I received no treatment.I reported to my relatives, not to outsiders,
because when they see a woman bleeding they may think she has made an
abortion.When I was caught by the
troops, my child ran away.I reached Gok
Jinjor without knowing where my child was.After I arrived, I received information that the child joined another
group of people and I sent my relatives from group to group. I have suffered
long term harm.It is still difficult
for me to walk.The same thing has
happened to other women.[112]

Other rapes have occurred in similar circumstances.In May 2004, a young woman was raped by four
soldiers beside a road near Chentoa in Gilo wereda while her teenage sister
screamed in protest.[113]Another woman was raped alongside of a road
near Abobo in November 2004.Although
she suffered serious pain and bleeding for two weeks after the attack, she
never sought medical treatment.[114]Human Rights Watch also received reports of
numerous rapes committed by ENDF soldiers along roads throughout Gilo wereda,
especially in Gok and Jor.[115]

Ethiopian troops have also raped women in and around their
own villages.Seven women from Okuna
Pino have reportedly been raped by soldiers coming through the village on
patrol since August 2004; one young man told Human Rights Watch that his cousin
was gang raped at gunpoint by four soldiers there in November 2004."One soldier aimed his gun at her," he said,
"and as he did so he told her to give herself over to another one."[116]In August or September 2004, a group of
soldiers, reportedly from the garrison in Illea, pulled a woman and her husband
from their home near Itang, gang raped her just outside the house, and then
shot and killed her husband.[117]In a village in Powatalam kebele, ENDF
personnel reportedly raped a woman inside of her own home one night in October
2004.[118]

Soldiers stationed in permanent ENDF garrisons in Gok
Dipatch, Illea and Pochalla have reportedly raped women from nearby Anuak
villages with such frequency that most local women no longer walk outside of
their villages alone.One man from a
village near the Illea garrison told Human Rights Watch that his community had
given up trying to report incidents of rape to the garrison's commanding
officers.Instead, "the women are told
not to go to far places, and if they go to collect firewood to go in a big
group and to run if they see soldiers."[119]Human Rights Watch received reports of five
rapes that took place near the garrison in Illea in 2004.[120]

Beatings and Torture

ENDF soldiers routinely detain and interrogate Anuak men
they encounter in searches of Anuak villages or in the countryside.According to people who have witnessed or
been subjected to them, these interrogations are generally linked to efforts to
locate Anuak shifta or search for
illegal firearms.[121]In many cases, soldiers beat their detainees
during interrogation and these beatings are often severe enough to rise to the
level of torture.[122]In other cases, ENDF personnel have beaten
Anuak men without questioning them at all.

Many villagers interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that
whenever ENDF patrols approach their villages, the men from the village run
into the bush and hide until the soldiers leave.The soldiers leading the patrols usually tell
villagers that they are looking for people connected to the shifta or for illegal guns, and
interrogate any young or middle-aged men they find.One man from a village near Pinyudo called
Butaboro explained, "When they circle the village they are looking for a man
above fourteen years old.For smaller
children it is not serious- only if you are over fourteen it is very serious if
they get you."[123]

Witnesses and victims told Human Rights Watch that soldiers
routinely beat the men they find in these sweeps of Anuak villages.Two men from Okuna Pino said that throughout
2004, ENDF patrols that passed through their village every one to two weeks
beat and interrogated any young men they found there.[124]"The troops do not like to see young men,"
one of them said."When they see one,
they capture him, beat him, and ask him many questions." A relative of this man
suffered several broken ribs when he was beaten by ENDF soldiers in mid-2004
and had to seek medical treatment at the Catholic mission's clinic in Abobo.[125] In
September 2004, a man named Ochut Lai was taken into custody by a group of
soldiers in Pinyudo as he left a local beer house.He later said that he was taken to the ENDF
garrison and severely beaten with iron bars as he was interrogated for
information about illegal guns and Anuak shifta.He never recovered from his injuries and died
two months later.[126]

ENDF soldiers often accuse any men they believe to be from
outside of the village they are searching of engaging in unlawful
activities.One young man who was beaten
when soldiers arrived in his village in September or October 2004 recalled:

I was caught one time in my
village.They had circled it to look for young men like us.They separated the
men into young and old.They said to us,
"Where are you from?You don't look like
people from here." We said, "No, we are
from this village.It is you who are new
to this place."They had no response to
this, they just said, "No, we don't know you.We only know these old men, not you."Then they started beating us with their guns.[127]

One man from a village called Otiel in the Jor region of
Gilo wereda told Human Rights Watch that for a period of several months in
2004, any men found on the roads near his village were routinely accused of
being shifta, detained, interrogated
and severely beaten by soldiers stationed in a temporary encampment
nearby.Whenever someone was detained,
the village headman would be called to the camp the next morning and asked
whether he recognized the detainee as someone from the village.If the man was from Otiel, he would be
released and sent home to nurse his wounds.If the village headman did not recognize him, he would be kept in
custody.No one in Otiel had been able
to find out what happened to the several men who were not released.[128]

ENDF patrols that encounter Anuak men on secondary roads or
in the bush often detain, interrogate and beat them.One twenty-year-old man from Okuna Pino
described what happened to him when he encountered a group of soldiers along a
secondary road in June 2004:

I was carrying some clothes in
a plastic bag and accidentally met some soldiers.I didn't have a chance to run.They asked me what I was carrying.I was bending down to open the bag and when I
was facing down [one soldier] kicked me in the face with his boot.After he kicked me, I was a bit stunned and
then I opened the bag and showed him that it was just clothes and a Bible.Then another man came and hit me in the ribs
with the end of his gun.I fell
down.They asked me, "What do you do?"
and I said that I am a student.They
told me to show them my ID and I told them that there are no IDs for students
in the villages.They said that I am a
liar.By this time I was very much
affected [badly hurt] and so they didn't think of beating me again because I
seemed as though I could not get up.I
just lay there for maybe two hours.I was hurt badly.Sometimes I still feel pain in my ribs.[129]

Human Rights Watch heard credible reports of dozens of
similar incidents.This form of abuse is
so widespread that many Anuak villagers described it as a routine part of their
existence that one simply has to accept.Several of the Anuak men interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that
they considered a severe beating to be the inevitable outcome of any encounter
with ENDF soldiers.Despite the
frequency and severity of these abuses, people often said that they did not
think such incidents were worth discussing.As one farmer from a village in Jor called Omedho said, "The beatings
are always happening-this is not a major problem.We don't bother to take their names.If all they do is beat you, you are lucky."[130]

Witnesses and victims from every Anuak community mentioned
in this report gave credible accounts of abuses that fit within the pattern set
forth above.Continuing abuses of this
nature are especially frequent and widespread in the Gok and Jor regions of
Gilo wereda.[131]

Destruction of Property and Looting

Between December 2003 and May 2004, ENDF forces raided,
looted and razed Anuak neighborhoods in Gambella town, Pinyudo, Abobo and Dimma
as well as several villages in Tedo, Okuna, Abodoand Powatalam kebeles.In
the course of those attacks, soldiers have destroyed Anuak houses and grain
stores, slaughtered or stolen livestock and looted homes, schools and
clinics.

In March or April 2004,[132]
ENDF soldiers attacked the village
of Okuna Pino near Abobo,
destroying nearly every house in the village along with anything else that
could be smashed or burned.One witness
to the attack described the devastation wrought by the attackers:

They burned all of the village
and the school and the clinic.This was
in [March or April].I was there but we
escaped.When they came they shot a gun and we all ran and scattered in the
forest.We could see everything from the
forest because it is not dense and you can see the village very clearly.They were taking fire and putting it on the
houses.They also went to the grain
stores and burned them.Also [there are]
some big pots where we keep maize for famine times.They took sticks and hit the pots and after
the maize was scattered they took grass and put it on the maize and burnt
it.There are fires at the homes-these are cooking fires.They took grass from the roofs and lit it in
these fires and then they used the burning grass to light other houses.There
was nothing left.My house was burned
down.[133]

Other attacks have been equally destructive.As discussed above, ENDF soldiers razed over
1000 houses in the attack on Anuak neighborhoods in Pinyudo town on December
17, 2003.The attack on Anuak populations
in Dimma in January 2004 left over 200 houses destroyed, and ENDF soldiers
destroyed over 400 Anuak homes in Abobo in early2004.[134]Most of the houses in three villages in Tedo
kebele were destroyed in three separate military attacks beginning in March
2004.[135]More recently, soldiers burned several houses
in each of three Anuak villages in Powatalam kebele in September 2004.[136]

A typical Anuak tukul
in Abobo. 2004 Human Rights Watch

-

The tukul in the foreground was destroyed by
ENDF soldiers during the attack on Anuak neighborhoods in Pinyudo.The house in the background was built after
the attack, with plastic sheeting used as makeshift roofing material. 2004 Human Rights Watch

ENDF forces have destroyed other property in the course of
these attacks as well.In the attacks on
Anuak communities in Pinyudo and Abobo described above, soldiers destroyed
grinding mills that were operated cooperatively by neighborhood residents.At the time of Human Rights Watch's mission
to Gambella, those mills were still nonfunctional and the residents who
depended on them were forced to pay high prices to use mills operated by local
merchants.

Farmers in many villages store surplus powdered maize in large
clay pots as insurance against lean times.Witnesses to several attacks on rural Anuak communities described how
soldiers went from house to house smashing these pots before spoiling their
contents by burning them.In some cases
the soldiers explained their actions by claiming that they needed to search for
bullets buried in the powdered maize.[137]

Even villages that have not suffered attacks by ENDF forces
have often seen their inhabitants' most important property looted by nearby
garrisons or patrols.Theft of livestock
is especially common, especially in the western part of Gilo wereda where many
rural Anuak maintain large herds of cattle, sheep and goats.[138]One man from Ulaw kebele in Jorsaid:

The people of Jor have lots of
cattle.[The soldiers] come and take as
much as they want-they are always eating meat.Some they eat and some they sell to highlanders in [Pinyudo] town.Even sometimes when people of Jor come [to Pinyudo]
they recognize their cattle.[139]

Livestock theft has been a continuing problem in Tedo
kebele.[140]Several villagers interviewed by Human Rights
Watch said that soldiers often offer them absurdly low prices for their cattle
and say that if they do not accept the offered prices their cattle will be
taken without compensation.Another
villager from Jor lamented, "If you do not accept the price they give you then
you will lose the money and your cattle as well."[141]

ENDF soldiers have also looted clinics and schools in some
Anuak villages.At least one school and
clinic were looted during the attack in Pinyudo in December 2003.[142]Soldiers who established an encampment near
Otiel for three months in 2004 ransacked the village's clinic and school,
destroying much of the property within and using the tables from both buildings
as beds.[143]In February or March, soldiers who attacked
the village of Abodo in the Jor region of Gilo wereda
smashed all of the furniture in the school and used some of the wood to cook
themselves dinner after the attack.[144]A school in Chentoa in Gilo wereda was
reportedly looted by soldiers who used a truck to carry off the furniture
inside.[145]

Displacement and Food Shortages

The continuing violence in Gambella has forced several
thousand people from their homes, leaving the already-troubled region saddled
with thousands of new internally displaced persons (IDPs) and driving thousands
more to seek refuge in neighboring countries.The prevailing climate of insecurity generated by ENDF abuses has also
led many Anuak farmers to abandon their fields, exacerbating Gambella's already
serious food security problems.

Violence against rural Anuak communities has driven
thousands of Anuak civilians from their homes since December 2003.An estimated eight to ten thousand people
fled more than two hundred kilometers on foot across the Sudanese border to
seek refuge in the town of Pochalla in southern Sudan in the
early months of 2004.[146]The flow of refugees across the border has
reportedly slowed to a trickle in more recent months and several thousand
refugees returned to Gambella in mid- to late-2004, but thousands still
remain.Aid workers providing assistance
to the local community estimate that the Anuak refugee population in and around
Pochalla now remains static at around 6500 people.[147]In addition, some 1200 Anuak refugees have
made their way to Kenya.[148]

The repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence and widespread
abuses committed by ENDF forces have left an enormous proportion of Gambella's
population internally displaced.In July
2004, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 51,000 people in Gambella
had been displaced by conflict at some point since 2003; that figure represents
at least twenty percent of the region's total population.[149]A large proportion of Gambella's Anuak IDPs
have migrated to large towns and villages such as Pinyudo, Abobo and Gambella
town.Many people, however, have tried
to escape the violence afflicting their communities by spending days or even
weeks at a time living in the bush hiding from ENDF patrols.A farmer from a village called Tier Kudhi in
Perbongo kebele said that he along with many of his neighbors had fled their
village and lived in the forest for several weeks starting in July 2004."Now many people are in the forest," he said."You go group by group to a place where there
is water and you can at least hunt some food."[150]One man from Gok Dipatch told Human Rights
Watch that many people from his village were often forced to seek refuge in the
bush and subsisted by "eating fruits like the monkeys in the forest."[151]Human Rights Watch met one man who had fled a
patrol he saw approaching his village in Gok Dipatch.The patrol had remained in the area for
several days and after spending three or four nights in the forest waiting for
the soldiers to leave, he gave up and made his way on foot to Pinyudo.He spoke with Human Rights Watch a few hours
after arriving in the town.He had not
eaten in days, his clothes were in tatters and his skin was covered in bites
and scratches."I was in the forest for
almost a week," he said, "and I have only the clothes on my back."[152]

Gambella is also facing serious food shortages in 2005.Agricultural production in the region is
expected to fall by 50 percent in 2005 as compared with 2004, and nearly 50,000
people (including 27,000 Anuak), are expected to require food aid in 2005.[153]These problems are not due solely to ethnic
conflict and displacement; sporadic and insufficient rains ruined some farmers'
crops in 2004.However, OCHA and Ethiopia's
Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission (DPPC) cite conflict and
insecurity as the main reason that the total area under cultivation in Gambella
decreased by 25 percent from 2003 to 2004.[154]Human Rights Watch interviewed several
farmers who said that they had abandoned their fields in 2004 because of the
danger from shifta-hunting ENDF
patrols.Others said that they traveled
to their fields only sporadically, when there were no ENDF soldiers in the
area, and that they had lost some of their unguarded crops to monkeys, cattle
and other animals.[155]

Abuses Committed by Armed Anuak Groups in Late 2003
and 2004

At least one hundred highlander civilians have been killed
in attacks carried out by armed Anuak in late 2003 and 2004.Some of these attacks have been particularly
brutal.In spite of the efforts of
federal and military authorities to bring the perpetrators of these attacks to
justice, almost none of them have been arrested or prosecuted.

A series of ambushes along major roads have contributed to a
widely shared sense of insecurity within Gambella's highlander community.[156]Individuals who record these abuses reported
to Human Rights Watch that at least forty-four people have been killed in ten
such ambushes since November 2003.[157]In most of these cases, gunmen hiding in the
grass beside major roads have opened fire on civilian vehicles, killing many or
all of their occupants.

On November 17, 2003, five private contractors working on a
road rehabilitation project outside of Abobo (forty kilometers south of
Gambella town) were ambushed and killed.All five were highlanders and in both Gambella and Addis Ababa the attack was widely blamed on
Anuak shifta; no one was ever
arrested or tried for the murders.[158]This attack in particular aroused a great
deal of fear and anger within the highlander population.The massacre in Gambella town one month later
was sparked by anger over a similar and exceptionally brutal attack.[159]

In addition to these ambushes, groups of armed Anuak carried
out two major attacks against highlander civilian populations in 2004.The first attack, which was apparently
carried out in reprisal for the December 2003 massacre, took place outside of
Dimma town at the end of January.The
countryside around Dimma contains deposits of gold that have attracted
thousands of highlander artisanal miners, mainly from the neighboring Southern
Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region.On or around January 30, a large group of armed Anuak descended on the
area where most of the miners are concentrated and massacred between 50 and 172
of them.[160]This attack claimed more civilian lives than
any other single incident since the December 2003 massacre in Gambella
town.Human Rights Watch was not able to
investigate this incident in detail because of the impossibility of traveling
to Dimma from Gambella town.[161]Anuak witnesses who were in Dimma town at the
time of the attack, however, reported seeing dozens of wounded highlanders who
were brought to the town for medical treatment later that day.Many appeared to suffer from machete and bullet
wounds.[162]

In March 2004, armed Anuak attacked a highlander village
near Abobo known as Village 13.[163]At least twenty civilians were killed in that
attack.Much of the village was burned
to the ground and many homes were looted.After this attack, fear of further violence drove large numbers of
highlanders from Village 13 and other nearby settlements to abandon their homes
and move to Abobo or Gambella town.[164]

It remains unclear to what extent any organized group or
groups are responsible for these abuses.Several sources, including many Anuak villagers and some government
officials and members of civil society, said they believe many of these attacks
to be revenge killings.Since ENDF
forces in Gambella are considered highlanders by most Anuak, many Anuak see
highlander civilians as legitimate targets in reprisals for ENDF murders of
Anuak civilians.[165]Whoever is responsible for the attacks,
inaction on the part of the Anuak-led regional administration prior to December
2003 contributed to a widespread perception that the regional authorities were
not committed to stopping or even seriously investigating them.That perception in turn fueled the growing
ethnic tensions that exploded with such violence on December 13, 2003.

The leadership of the Sudan-based Gambella People's
Liberation Front (GPLF) denies that its fighters have been responsible for any
attacks on highlander civilians, insisting that the organization attacks only
military targets and that in any event it has not carried out any attacks since
March or April 2004.[166]Several sources indicated to Human Rights
Watch that most of the ambushes along Gambella's roads were carried out by a
group of two to three dozen Anuak fighters, many of whom are former regional
police officers.[167]The leader of that group was reportedly
killed in a raid by military forces in early 2004,[168]
and the number and frequency of reported ambushes has in fact decreased
significantly since then.[169]This fact has done nothing to ease the steep
price Gambella's entire Anuak community is being made to pay for these attacks,
however.

The Response of the Ethiopian Government

Aside from a series of inadequate efforts to investigate the
December 2003 massacre in Gambella town, the Ethiopian government has not taken
action to prevent ENDF forces from committing human rights violations against
Anuak communities or to punish the individuals responsible for those
abuses.Indeed, federal authorities have
not publicly admitted that the military has committed any abuses in Gambella
since December 2003.Regional and police
authorities have also been unable or unwilling to respond to persistent
complaints of abuse by members of affected communities, who report that
military authorities have often responded to such complaints with hostility and
threats of further violence.

The Ethiopian Government's Response to the December
2003 Massacre

The December 2003 massacre is the only case of human rights
abuse committed by the Ethiopian military in Gambella that the Ethiopian
government has made an effort to investigate or remedy.The government's response, however, has been
inadequate and often disingenuous.

Federal officials initially sought both to downplay the
massacre and to blame it on the government's enemies.Dr. Gebrehab Barnabas, who was then the
deputy minister of federal affairs and the highest-ranking federal official
with direct responsibility for Gambella, issued a statement several days after
the massacre asserting that two insurgent groups the Ethiopian government
considers to be terrorist organizations, the Oromo Liberation Front and Itihad
al Islamiya, were behind the violence.[170]After several days of increasing press and
international attention, however, the federal government dispatched federal
police officers to Gambella town to investigate and interview Anuak victims of
the violence.Several victims who gave
their accounts to those investigators told Human Rights Watch that they found
the officers to be honest and reasonably thorough in their efforts to gather
evidence against the highlander civilians who took part in the massacre.Whenever they implicated ENDF soldiers in the
violence, however, they received far chillier responses.All of the interviewees who later spoke with
Human Rights Watch said that the police refused to take seriously their
insistence that large numbers of clearly identifiable uniformed military
personnel had been involved in the massacre.Many of those witnesses said that the interviewing officers insisted
that they could not take accusations about army violations seriously unless
witnesses provided the names of the soldiers they had seen committing abuses,
which not surprisingly they were unable to do.One woman who witnessed her husband's murder at the hands of a group of
ENDF soldiers said that when she told the police what had happened, "they were
opposing me, telling me not to say it was soldiers who killed him.They said, 'What are the names of those
soldiers?If you do not know this then
why do you say it was them?'"[171]One woman said that when she told
investigating officers that her father had been killed by soldiers they
replied, "How do you know?Maybe he was
killed by sickness."[172]

Roughly one week after the massacre, Deputy Minister of
Federal Affairs Gebrehab Barnabas flew to Gambella town and convened a meeting
with several dozen Anuak survivors of the massacre.Also present at these meetings were Omot
Obang Olom, chief of security for Gambella region, and Almaw Alemeraw, an
"expert" from the ministry of federal affairs who according to many reports has
been wielding executive power in Gambella since the flight of former Regional
President Okello Akway.Gebrehab opened the meeting by saying
that he wanted to hear what had happened to those present.When victim after victim stood up and said
that the military had taken the lead in the killing, however, he interrupted
each of them and told them that they were mistaken, that the military had been
there to protect them.Eventually, when
one man stood up and demanded that Gebrehab explain why the people who attacked
his home were wearing uniforms if they were not soldiers, Gebrehab exclaimed,
"You were not attacked by the military!Why don't you tell the truth?"He
then spoke at length about the need to capture the Anuak shifta who had ambushed the ARRA car on the morning of December 13.[173]

The government's initial position, that no soldiers had
taken part in the massacre, quickly became impossible to defend.In March 2004, the Federal Government took
the unusual step of appointing an Independent Commission of Inquiry to look
into the violence, chaired by the chief judge of the Supreme Court, Kemal
Bedri.The Commission's report failed to
put forward anything resembling an accurate description of the massacre.The number of deaths was grossly
underestimated at sixty-five, and interviewees' statements to the members of
the Commission that large numbers of soldiers had attacked their homes
alongside the mobs of civilians were not reflected in the Commission's
findings.The Commission's final report
reached the conclusion that while a small number of rogue elements from within
the ENDF's ranks had taken part in the killing, the military as a whole
deserved only praise for single-handedly bringing the situation under control.[174]

Some moves have been made by the federal police to
investigate and punish highlander civilians who took part in the massacre, but
these efforts have been haphazard and have resulted in few reported
convictions.[175]Many Anuak victims of the violence told Human
Rights Watch that they were still living surrounded by the same neighbors who
had attacked their families on December 13, 2003, despite having provided the
names of their attackers to federal police investigators.The federal government eventually demoted Dr.
Gebrehab and transferred him to Tigray to become the head of its Regional
Health Bureau, but he has never faced any formal investigation or sanction
related to the massacre.

Regional officials have taken some steps towards holding
regional police personnel accountable for their role in the massacre; the
regional authorities have arrested a small number of former police officers and
recently stated that they had fired thirty-two others in connection with the
massacre.[176]Most significantly, the former head of the
regional police force, Tadesse Haile Selassie, was arrested in early 2005 in
connection with the killings.Regional
authorities have issued no public statements beyond an acknowledgement of his
arrest and it is not clear whether he will eventually be charged with any
crimes.[177]

In contrast, neither military nor federal authorities have
taken any steps to hold ENDF officers accountable for their role in the
violence. In September 2004, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi announced
the launch of a second inquiry into the December 13, 2003 killings, but so far
the only move it has made against the military was the arrest of eight
low-ranking soldiers in January 2005.MajorTsegyae Beyene, the
commander of ENDF forces in Gambella at the time of the massacre, was
transferred to the nearby town of Abobo
within Gambella region.[178]This was widely perceived throughout Gambella
as an informal demotion, but he retains his rank and the troops under his
command have been implicated in continuing human rights abuses in the Abobo
area since his transfer.[179]

Federal and regional authorities have not compensated the
massacre's victims.Soldiers and
highlander civilians were ordered to rebuild many of the destroyed homes in
Anuak neighborhoods in the weeks following the massacre, but they did such a
poor job of constructing them that most of the houses were uninhabitable from
the moment they were built.[180]At the time of Human Rights Watch's research
mission, these houses could be seen scattered throughout Anuak neighborhoods in
Gambella town.Most were overgrown with
weeds and many of their walls and roofs had collapsed.None of the houses were inhabited.

This house in Gambella town's Omminingah neighborhood was
rebuilt by soldiers and highlander townspeople after they razed the
neighborhood during the December 2003 massacre.The house was so poorly constructed that no family was willing to live
in it, and its roof quickly collapsed.Similar houses are scattered throughout Gambella town. 2004 Human Rights Watch

The Ethiopian Government's Response to Continuing
Abuses in Gambella

The Ethiopian Government has not publicly admitted that ENDF
forces could have been involved in or committed serious human rights violations
in Gambella since December 2003 and has taken no effective steps to halt those
abuses or hold perpetrators accountable.No explanation has been offered even for the highly visible attacks that
have destroyed entire Anuak villages and neighborhoods.

Witnesses and victims from several Anuak communities told
Human Rights Watch that ENDF officers usually responded to complaints of abuse
dismissively or even angrily.One
officer in particular, CaptainAmare,
has convened several meetings with Anuak community leaders over the past year,
only to tell them that they themselves are to blame for ENDF attacks on their
villages.[181]He has routinely accused those present at
these meetings of sheltering Anuak shifta
and explains military attacks on their villages as a necessary response to the
villagers' own complicity in attacks on highlander civilians.Amare was stationed in Abobo when ENDF forces
under his command burned the village
of Okuna Pino to the
ground in March or April 2004.Shortly
after the attack, Amare went to the village and gathered community leaders for
a meeting.One man who was present at
that meeting recalled:

The military came and called
the elders in the village.They said,
"Now it is peaceful and the people [who fled] have to come back."They mentioned nothing about the burning-they
said, "What happened is already past and we have to talk about how to live
together now."Nobody dared to ask them
about the burning.Captain Amare was
there.He was telling us, "Why do you
people run to the bush whenever you see us-are you not Ethiopians, and are we
not Ethiopian soldiers?So why are you
running unless you are the enemy?"No
one really could respond because he has to talk and talk and so people come
only for listening.[182]

Captain Amare is currently in command of the garrison in
Illea, near the town of Itang,
where he has adopted a similar style of leadership.When a delegation of farmers from a nearby
village came to him to complain about a series of rapes that soldiers had
committed in their village in November 2004, Amare accused them of being liars
and sent them away.One of the men
present said that after that meeting, "the farmers decided not to report these
things.We just keep quiet."[183]

Major Tsegaye Beyene, a central figure in the December 2003
massacre who has never faced formal investigation or sanction, was in a
position of command in Abobo as recently as January 2005.One man from Abobo interviewed by Human
Rights Watch attended a meeting called by Tsegaye in March or April 2004 where
someone in the audience stood up to complain about abuses that ENDF soldiers
had committed in his village.Tsegaye's
response was typical of statements he is reported to have made at several other
such meetings:

He was saying that we are
killing highlanders and that people from our villages are running to Pochalla [Sudan] and
bringing back guns to ambush people with.He said that we have to bring the people who ambush the cars to him and
that if we do not it means that we are together with them.He said that unless we expose these people
they would continue to kill us.We were
saying that those who ran to Pochalla did so because they were afraid and not
because they wanted to bring guns.He
did not accept this.He said he knew
that many of our young people are in the bush to ambush the government, but he
said that we could bring nothing against him even if we all went to the bush to
fight.[184]

Occasionally, ENDF officers profess their willingness to
investigate abuses committed by the men under their command, but villagers
interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that such assurances usually turn out to
be disingenuous.In May 2004, a
delegation from a village near Chentoa went to the commanding officer of the
garrison in Pochalla to report a gang rape committed by soldiers under his
command.The officer said that he would
punish the men responsible if the victim could identify them.When the delegation returned the next day
they brought the victim with them and the officer lined up a group of soldiers
in front of her, but the men who raped her were not present.When the victim said that the men who raped
her were absent from the lineup, the officer scolded her for falsely accusing
his men and sent her away.[185]

Regional government and police officials have been no more
responsive to complaints of abuse lodged against ENDF soldiers.In each of several instances reported to
Human Rights Watch, officials responded to such complaints by professing their
own helplessness to act and urging those reporting the abuse to remain silent
for the sake of their own safety.In one
case in December 2003, wereda officials from Pinyudo went out into the
countryside to see the bodies of three men who had been killed by ENDF
soldiers.One of the villagers who had
reported the crime to them recalled, "[The officials] were Anuak people, but
they said, 'There is nothing we can do.The soldiers can do what they will do and we have no power over them.'"[186] More
recently, in November 2004 a delegation from an Anuak village in Gilo wereda
reported the murder of three young men by ENDF soldiers to wereda
officials.One member of that delegation
recalled that the official they spoke with told them, "Go, and if the body is
not yet buried, bury it and keep quiet.There is nothing we can do about this problem."[187]

In the face of such obstacles, many Anuak civilians
interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that they no longer made any attempt to
report crimes committed by soldiers in their communities.One man whose two sons were shot and killed
by ENDF soldiers in front of his eyes during the December 2003 attack on
Pinyudo said that he had never tried to report the killing."It is not easy," he said."If you report such things you will be asked
who killed them.It is difficult for me
to say, 'you did' if I am talking to the military or even to say 'soldiers' if
I am talking to the police.So I kept
quiet."Human Rights Watch heard of only
one occasion where ENDF soldiers were arrested and jailed for committing abuses
against Anuak civilians after the December massacre.[188]

In January 2005, a high-level government delegation
including the deputy prime minister and the ministers of federal affairs,
information, education, agriculture, water resources and health visited
Gambella to discuss the region's problems with community leaders.However, some of the people invited to meet
with those officials told Human Rights Watch that Anuak community leaders were
not given the opportunity to express their opinions about Gambella's
problems.The delegation ultimately
announced that they intended to solve Gambella's security problems by sending
in more ENDF soldiers to combat the "anti-peace" elements responsible for
ambushes along the region's roads.[189]

Federal authorities have tapped Omot Obang Olom, chief of
security in Gambella, as their choice for regional president in the May 2005
elections.Omot Obang is an Anuak but
has taken an exceptionally hard-line approach to stamping out the threat to
regional security posed by Anuak shifta.[190]In each of several meetings with prominent
members of Gambella's Anuak community in 2004, he has responded to complaints
of human rights abuses committed by ENDF forces with threats of further
violence.Individuals who attended many
of these meetings told Human Rights Watch that he often accuses those present
of collaborating with Anuak shifta
and asserts that they have no right to ask that violence against Anuak
communities come to an end as long as they remain disloyal to the government.[191]One reliable source recalled that at one
meeting in late January 2004, Omot Obang told the assembled crowd that they had
to choose between "do[ing] what the government orders" and going into the bush
to fight.If they chose the latter, "he said
that the government has enough force to wipe us all out.He said that they have thousands and
thousands of soldiers throughout Ethiopia and that they could even
destroy the forests we hide in if they need to."[192]

The International Response to Human Rights Abuses in
Gambella

"I remember a certain chicken epidemic in China.When a certain number of chickens had died,
the Chinese government called an emergency meeting and the whole world was
paying attention.When I compare this
with the response to what is happening to us in Gambella it is truly
remarkable."

Anuak refugee, Ruiru, Kenya

In the immediate aftermath of the December 2003 massacre, a
brief flurry of media attention spurred numerous expressions of international
concern about the situation in Gambella.Despite the Ethiopian government's failure to take any meaningful action
to address ongoing abuses in the region, international attention has since
waned considerably.

Since the December 2003 massacre, there has been an almost
complete dearth of reliable information about the situation on the ground in
Gambella.The event that sparked the
massacre, an ambush of an ARRA vehicle, also drove nearly every donor and
international agency to withdraw its personnel from the region.[193]Aside from a few heavily guarded day-trips to
Gambella town by representatives of UN and donor agencies, there was minimal
international presence in Gambella for most of 2004.The ICRC maintained a permanent presence in
the region throughout the year, but security concerns have dissuaded it from
attempting to travel to the areas where abuse is rampant.[194]Western diplomatic sources told Human Rights
Watch that one result of this lack of information has been that no governments
or donor agencies have been comfortable challenging the Ethiopian government's
assurances that the persistent allegations of ENDF atrocities in Gambella are
unfounded.[195]

The security issues that have led the international
community to withdraw from Gambella are legitimate, but there is cause for
concern that the Ethiopian government is manipulating those security issues to
keep information from filtering out of the region for as long as possible.In any event, reports of ongoing abuses in
the region have emerged with enough frequency that the silence of the UN and
donor community is impossible to justify.

At the end of 2004, international agencies began moving back
into Gambella town.It remains to be
seen whether these agencies will now press for broader access to the region's
most troubled communities.In January
2005, the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia
called on the Ethiopian government to follow through on pledges to hold
accountable any military, police or government officials involved in human
rights abuses in Gambella.[196]Although that statement made reference only
to events that took place in December 2003 and early 2004, it may be a sign
that international interest has not faded completely.

Crimes against Humanity under International Law

ENDF forces have committed murder, torture and rape in the
course of widespread and possibly systematic attacks directed against the Anuak
civilian population in Gambella.Human
Rights Watch believes that these attacks bear the hallmark of crimes against
humanity under international law.

Crimes against humanity were first codified in the charter
of the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945. The purpose was to prohibit crimes "which
either by their magnitude and savagery or by their large number or by the fact
that a similar pattern was appliedendangered the international community or
shocked the conscience of mankind."[197]Since then, the concept has been incorporated
into a number of international treaties and the statutes of international
criminal tribunals, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court.[198]The definition of crimes against humanity
varies slightly by treaty, but as a matter of customary international law the
term "crimes against humanity" includes a range of serious human rights abuses
committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack by a government or
organization against a civilian population.[199]Murder, torture and rape all fall within the
range of acts that can qualify as crimes against humanity.[200]Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity
may be committed in times of peace or in periods of unrest that do not rise to
the level of an armed conflict.

Crimes against humanity include only abuses that take place
as part of an attack against a civilian population.So long as the targeted population is of a
predominantly civilian nature, the presence of some combatants does not alter
its classification as a "civilian population" as a matter of law.[201]Rather, it is necessary only that the
civilian population be the primary object of the attack.[202]Thus abuses ENDF forces directed against
Anuak civilians even during the course of military operations in Anuak villages
and neighborhoods can fall under the definition of crimes against
humanity.

The attack against a civilian population underlying the
commission of crimes against humanity must be widespread or systematic.It need not be both.[203]"Widespread" refers to the scale of the acts
or number of victims.[204]Human Rights Watch considers the numerous
acts of murder, torture and rape by ENDF soldiers against the Anuak civilian
population to be "widespread."Human
Rights Watch documented more than 500 extrajudicial killings and dozens of
incidents of rape and torture across nineteen different Anuak communities,
starting with the December 2003 massacre in Gambella town and continuing
throughout 2004.The December 2003
massacre, which claimed as many as 424 lives and resulted in the near-total
destruction of the town's largest Anuak neighborhoods, can by itself be
considered a widespread attack.Even a
single violent attack that is part of broader widespread operation may amount
to a crime against humanity.[205]

A "systematic" attack indicates "a pattern or methodical
plan."[206]International courts have considered to what
extent a systemic attack requires a policy or plan.For instance, such a plan need not be adopted
formally as a policy of the state.[207]Human Rights Watch does not have evidence
allowing a conclusive determination one way or the other as to whether the
abuses committed by ENDF forces in Gambella have been systematic.Nonetheless, the similarity of many of the attacks
on the 19 neighborhoods, towns and villages in 2004 documented by Human Rights
Watch strongly suggests a pattern to the attacks.While abuses were committed at different
times and in different locations, they do not appear to have been a series of sporadic
and unconnected events. [208]

Finally, for persons to be found culpable for crimes against
humanity requires their having the relevant knowledge of the crime.[209]That is, perpetrators must be aware that
their actions formed part of the widespread or systematic attack against the
civilian population.[210]While perpetrators need not be identified
with a policy or plan underlying crimes against humanity, they must at least
have knowingly taken the risk of participating in the policy or plan.[211] An
investigation into crimes against humanity in Gambella would need to address
this element of the crime.

The Ethiopian government has a legal obligation to prosecute
and punish officials and military personnel responsible for the commission of
crimes against humanity.[212]Those accused of crimes against humanity
cannot avail themselves of the defense of following superior orders nor benefit
from statutes of limitation.Because
crimes against humanity are considered crimes of universal jurisdiction, all
states are responsible for bringing to justice those who commit crimes against
humanity.There is an emerging trend in
international jurisprudence and standard setting that persons responsible for
crimes against humanity, as well as other serious violations of human rights,
should not be granted amnesty.

Acknowledgements

This report was written and researched by researchers from
the Africa and Arms divisions of Human Rights
Watch.This report was reviewed and
edited by Georgette Gagnon, deputy director of the Africa Division, Michael
Clough, interim advocacy director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch,
James Ross, senior legal advisor of Human Rights Watch, and Ian Levine, program
director of Human Rights Watch.Nicholas
Galletti, associate in the Africa Division, provided production
assistance.Andrea Holley, publications
director for Human Rights Watch, and Veronica Matushaj, photo editor and
associate director of Creative Services for Human Rights Watch, provided assistance
with the photographs.Fitzroy Hepkins,
mail manager, made possible the production of this report.

We owe special thanks to Matthew McKinzie of the National
Resources Defense Council, who produced the maps in this report for Human
Rights Watch and Space Imaging, which provide the satellite image of Gambella
town.

Human Rights Watch would also like to thank all of the
individuals in Ethiopia and
in Kenya
who came forward to share their testimonies or provided other information for
this report.

[1]Human Rights Watch interviewed a total of
eighty-four Anuak civilians from nineteen different towns and villages whose
populations have suffered human rights abuse at the hands of ENDF soldiers
since December 2003.

[2]
The last census conducted in Gambella, in 1994, determined the region's population
to be 162,397.The region's population
is estimated to have increased significantly in the intervening years.

[3]
Gambella's "highlander" population is far from homogenous; it is made up of
Tigrayans, Oromo, Kembatta, Amhara and other ethnicities from throughout Ethiopia.The term "highlander" is therefore so
imprecise as to be almost meaningless in an objective sense, but in the context
of Gambella the division between "highlander" and non-highlander is very real
and increasingly important to members of both "groups."This report will use the term "highlander"
for this reason and for the sake of convenience.

[4]
ZPEB is a subsidiary of China National Petrochemical Corporation
(Sinopec).Petronas has exclusive
exploration rights within a 15,000 km2 concession that stretches
across much of Gambella.See ZPEB Press Release, "Seismic Survey
Project in Ethiopia Put into Operation," December 9, 2004, [online]
http://www.zpebint.com/english/news/listcontentgs.asp?xxid=26453 (retrieved
February 4, 2005).

[5]
The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) fought against the Derg as allies of the
EPRDF.In 1992, the OLF withdrew from
elections that were marred by widespread harassment and intimidation of its
candidates and supporters and began waging a guerilla struggle against the new
government.The Ethiopian government
labels the OLF a "terrorist organization," while the OLF claims to be fighting
for the Oromo people's right to self-determination.Most of the OLF leadership is currently based
in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.

[6]
"The Derg" is the appellation most commonly used to refer to the brutal
military dictatorship that ruled Ethiopia from 1974-1991.When the military overthrew Emperor Haile
Selassie in 1974, it set up a committee of officers to head the revolutionary
government ("Derg" means "committee" in Amharic).The Derg was overthrown by a coalition of
rebel forces led by the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1991.

[7]
From 1984-1988, the Ethiopian government forced an estimated 600,000 people to
abandon their homes and relocate to areas that were supposedly fertile and
underpopulated.The program was
justified as an answer to the country's food security concerns, but was also
used to depopulate areas believed to be supportive of the TPLF-led insurgency
("draining the sea to catch the fish").See Human Rights Watch, Evil Days: 30 Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia
(New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991), pp. 210-229.A large proportion of the settlers were sent
to Gambella, which the central government described as containing huge areas of
fertile and uninhabited land.

[8]
In the 1980s, three refugee camps were opened that ultimately became home to at
least 150,000 refugees (the official UNHCR figures, which probably overstate
the true number of refugees, put their number at over 350,000).Human Rights Watch, Evil Days pp. 285-286. The vast majority of those refugees returned
home to Sudan after the fall of the Derg in 1991, but the camps' populations
have to a large degree been replenished since then by new influxes of Sudanese
refugees, many of them Nuer.As of
November 2004, UNHCR estimates that there are 68,000 refugees in three camps in
Gambella-31,000 in Fugnido, 19,000 in Dimma and 18,000 in Bonga.Because security concerns have largely kept
UNCHR staff out of the camps in 2004, these numbers have not been recently
verified and UNHCR representatives said that these figures may overstate the
actual refugee population.Human Rights
Watch interview with Fernando Protti-Alvarado, UNCHR Regional Liaison Office
for Africa Deputy Representative, Addis
Ababa, late 2004.

[9]
According to the 1994 census, Nuer make up 40 percent of Gambella's population,
Anuak 27 percent and "highlanders" 25 percent.Many in the Anuak community have disputed these figures and claim that
logistical difficulties in traveling to remote villages led to a massive
undercounting of the Anuak population.

[16]
This group has been blamed for many of the ambushes on highlander civilians and
civilian vehicles.Some reports indicate
that there may also be a third, larger group operating around Gok and Dimma.

[17]
Thuwath Pal Chay, a Nuer, was the top central government official in Gambella
for several years prior to the overthrow of the Derg.He claims to be fighting a "war of
liberation" that seeks to overthrow the EPRDF government and return Ethiopia to
socialism.Human Rights Watch interview
with Thuwath Pal Chay, Nairobi,
late 2004.

[19]
Although the Geneva Conventions of 1949 do not define "armed conflict,"
Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions on non-international armed conflicts
states that "situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots,
isolated and sporadic acts of violence and other acts of a similar nature," are
not armed conflicts.Protocol Additional
to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of
Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II), 1125 U.N.T.S. 609, entered
into force Dec. 7, 1978, article 1(2).http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/y6pagc.htm (retrieved March 11,
2005)

[20]
The Derg had favored the Nuer over the Anuak, and the local administration in
Gambella was dominated by Nuer until 1991.Largely for this reason, the armed struggle in Gambella was carried out
mainly by Anuak insurgents fighting alongside the TPLF and OLF.

[23]
According to a reliable source within the federal government, most of these
have been charged with offenses related to alleged collaboration with Anuak
insurgents and put on trial, but no one has yet been convicted.

[24]
Gambella has had four regional presidents since 1991.The first was murdered by his own (GPLM)
fighters in 1992.Of the remaining
three, one is in prison and the other is in exile.Gambella's last regional president, Okello
Akway, fled on foot to Pochalla, Sudan, several days after the December 2003
massacre in Gambella town and subsequently sought asylum in Norway.Gambella's Anuak representative to the House
of People's Representatives, Peter Opiti, is seeking asylum in Switzerland.

[25]
In 1998 the federal government forced the Anuak-dominated GPLM to merge with
the mainly Nuer Gambella Peoples Democratic Unity Party (GPDUP) into the
Gambella People's Democratic Front (GPDF).Disaffected Anuak then formed the opposition Gambella People's
Democratic Congress (GPDC).When the
GPDC seemed poised to make a strong showing in the 2000 elections, regional
authorities imprisoned many of its leaders, crippling the party.In 2003, the Ministry of Federal Affairs
forced the GPDF to disband and replaced it with a coalition of three
newly-created ethnic parties called the Gambella Peoples Democratic Movement
(GPDM).

[26]
The Ethiopian Ministry of Federal Affairs has stated that regional authorities
"requested" federal intervention in order to "save the people from the chaos
[that] ensued" after the December 2003 massacre.Ethiopian Ministry of Federal Affairs, "Gambella
State Government Sought Federal Intervention," [online]
http://www.mfa.gov.et/Press_Section/publication.php?Pub_Page_Id=484 (retrieved
January 25, 2005).

[27]
The number of ENDF personnel in Gambella is likely to increase dramatically in
the near future, as the military reportedly plans to transfer permanently a
large part of the garrison currently located near Jimma to a newlyconstructed
camp outside of Gambella town with the capacity to house 60,000 soldiers.Human Rights Watch interview with federal
official, Addis Ababa,
late 2004.It is worth mentioning that
this number of soldiers would be substantially higher than the entire Anuak
population of the region as recorded in the 1994 census.

[31]
This estimate is based on Human Rights Watch interviews in late 2004 with
twenty-four eyewitnesses to the massacre.

[32]
The attackers reportedly cut off the penis of the policeman, Solomon Tesfaye,
and put it in his mouth.Ethiopian Human
Rights Council (EHRCO), "A Ferocious Attack Committed in Gambella Region,"72nd Special Report, January
5, 2004.

[33]
The Ethiopian government and UNHCR sought to relocate most Sudanese Nuer
refugees from the camp near Pinyudo to a new site at a place called Odier
because they believed the new site to be more secure.There had been several violent clashes
between Sudanese Nuer refugees and local Anuak around Pinyudo, and officials
feared that they lacked the capacity to prevent further bloodshed if the Nuer
refugees remained in the Pinyudo camp.Human Rights Watch interview with Fernando Protti-Alvarado, UNHCR
Regional Liaison Office for Africa Deputy Representative, Addis Ababa, late 2004.

[54]
Human Rights Watch interviews with witnesses #30, 63, 85 and 86, Gambella and Addis Ababa, late 2004.
The Mekene Yesus church is Ethiopia's
largest mainstream Protestant church.In
Gambella, the church is divided along ethnic lines into Nuer and Anuak
congregations.Anuak civilians seeking
shelter took refuge in the compound of the church's Anuak synod.The Catholic and Mekene Yesus churches are
located close to the Anuak neighborhoods of Tier Kidi and Omminingah,
respectively.

[63]
A wereda is a unit of administrative governance in Ethiopia.The country's nine regions are divided into
zones, and the zones are divided into weredas.Gambella is divided into six weredas and one 'special' (or autonomous):
Gambella, Alwero-Openo, Gilo,
Jikaw, Akobo, Dimma and Godere (special).

[70]
A kebele is the unit of administrative governance below a wereda and the
smallest unit of government in Ethiopia.In urban areas, kebeles are akin to
neighborhood associations while in rural areas they often encompass several
small villages and hamlets over a relatively large area.

[71]
This is a conservative estimate and likely understates the number of people
killed.

[76]
Human Rights Watch interview with witness #44, Gambella, late 2004.Many of the villagers who fled have
subsequently returned and there have been no reported attacks on villages in
Tedo kebele since the attack in Abunjay.

[91]
Since this figure is drawn from interviews with Anuak civilians from a
relatively small number of villages, it is likely that the total number of such
killings in Gambella during this period has been substantially higher.Human Rights Watch received secondhand
reports of killings in and around many other communities throughout Gambella in
2004 but was not able to document them.Many people interviewed by Human Rights Watch said they had heard of
many people being killed by ENDF soldiers in remote areas of Gilo wereda.

[96]
This attack occurred during the month of Yekatit
according to the Ethiopian calendar (a variety of the Julian calendar). In
2004, Yekatit overlapped with both
February and March in the Gregorian calendar.

[122]
Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as "any act by which severe
pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a
person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or
a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is
suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third
person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain
or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or
acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official
capacity."

[157]
List of Attacks on Highlander Civilians in 2003 and 2004 prepared by highlander
sources in Gambella town, obtained by Human Rights Watch in Gambella.There were other ambushes prior to November
2003, but Human Rights Watch did not gather information about those attacks.

[160]
Highlander sources in Gambella told HRW that between fifty and sixty
highlanders had been killed in the attack.List of Attacks on Highlander Civilians in 2003 and 2004 prepared by
highlander sources in Gambella town, obtained by Human Rights Watch in
Gambella.The federal government put the
number of dead at 196, of whom 172 were said to be artisanal miners.Ethiopian Ministry of Federal Affairs, "The
Current Situation in Gambella," [online]
http://www.mfa.gov.et/Press_Section/publication.php?Page_Number=415 (retrieved
January 25, 2005).The remainder may
represent military deaths, as the perpetrators of this massacre reportedly
attacked a military encampment before proceeding to the mining area.Some reports indicated that they inflicted
heavy casualties on the garrison there.Human Rights Watch interviews, Addis Ababa
and Ruiru, Kenya, late 2004.

[161]
At the time of Human Rights Watch's research mission, the road between Gambella
town and Dimma was closed to vehicles traveling without a military escort.

[163]
Abobo and most of the villages in the surrounding area came into existence as
part of the Derg's resettlement program in the 1980s.Thousands of settlers from other regions of Ethiopia were
made to settle near large state farms that were established in the area.The resettled highlanders were dropped off in
newly created villages that were identified only by numbers.Most people in Gambella continue to use those
numbers to identify the villages.

[164]
Human Rights Watch interviews with NGO and federal official and with witness
#31, Addis Ababa and Gambella, late 2004; List of Attacks on Highlander
Civilians in 2003 and 2004 prepared by highlander sources in Gambella town,
obtained by Human Rights Watch in Gambella.

[168]
Human Rights Watch interviews with federal official and Anuak refugee community
leaders, Addis Ababa and Ruiru, Kenya,
late 2004.

[169]
Highlander sources in Gambella town told Human Rights Watch that there have
been two reported ambushes since February 2004-in June and November 2004.Four people were reportedly killed in each
attack.List of Attacks on Highlander
Civilians in 2003 and 2004 prepared by highlander sources in Gambella town,
obtained by Human Rights Watch in Gambella.Some sources indicated that there may have been other ambushes during
this period that Human Rights Watch's highlander sources in Gambella town were
not aware of.

[170]
"Ethiopia
Accuses Rebels of Inciting Killings," Reuters, December 17, 2003.Itihad al Islamiya is an insurgent group
operating primarily in the Somali region of Ethiopia that is accused of having
ties to international terrorist groups.

[188]
In that particularly egregious case in October 2004, two soldiers dragged two
women from their homes in the middle of a densely populated neighborhood in
Pinyudo and raped them as horrified neighbors looked on helplessly.Human Rights Watch interview with witness
#35, Gambella, late 2004.

[193]
The ARRA vehicle that was ambushed on the morning of December 13, 2003 had
license plates emblazoned with the logo of the United Nations.Even though ARRA is in no way connected to
the UN system and was using that logo without authorization, the attack led UN
staff to fear that the armed Anuak group responsible for the attack was
targeting UN personnel.This led the
United Nations to pull all of its agencies' staff out of Gambella, and almost
all foreign government agencies and international NGOs followed suit.Human Rights Watch interviews with United
Nations, donor government and civil society officials, Addis Ababa, late 2004.

[197]History of the United Nations War Crimes
Commission and the Development of the Laws of War (1943), p. 179, quoted in
Rodney Dixon, "Crimes against humanity," in Commentary
on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (O. Triffterer,
ed.) (1999), p. 123.

[199]See Rodney Dixon, "Crimes against humanity," in Commentary on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (O.
Triffterer, ed.) (1999), p. 122.This is
the standard applied by Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court.Ethiopia is not
a state party to the Rome Statute and is therefore not bound by it, but the
definition in Article 7 accords with the conception of crimes against humanity
in customary international law.

[200]
Murder and torture are among the core offenses that have been included within
the definition of crimes against humanity at least since the adoption of the
charter establishing the Nuremberg
tribunal after World War II.Rape was
not explicitly included in the charter's definition of crimes against humanity
in article 6(c) although it could be derived from that definition's general
prohibition against "other inhumane acts."This ambiguity has been resolved in recent years; the statutes of the
International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda
and the former Yugoslavia
as well as the Rome Statute all explicitly include rape in the list of
enumerated offenses that can constitute crimes against humanity.The ICC Statute also lists: extermination,
enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, persecution, enforced disappearance,
apartheid, and "other inhumane acts."ICC Statute, article 7(1).

[201]See,
e.g.,Prosecutor v. Naletilic and
Martinovic,International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Trial Chamber, March 31
2003, par. 235 ("The population against whom the attack is directed is
considered civilian if it is predominantly civilian"); Prosecutor v. Akayesu, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR), Trial Chamber, September 2, 1998, par. 582 ("Where there are certain
individuals within the civilian population who do not come within the
definition of civilians, this does not deprive the population of its civilian
character"); Prosecutor v.Jelisic, ICTY Trial Chamber, December
14, 1999, par. 54 ("The presence within the civilian population of individuals
who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the
population of its civilian character.").

[203]See Prosecutor v. Tadic, ICTY Trial
Chamber, para. 646 ("it is now well
established thatthe actscanoccur on either a widespread basis or in a
systematic manner.Either one of these
is sufficient to exclude isolated or random acts.").

[206]Tadic, para. 648.In
Kunarac, Kovac and Vokovic, the Appeals Chamber stated that "patterns of
crimes-that is the non-accidental repetition of similar criminal conduct on a
regular basis-are a common expression of [a] systematic occurrence." Para. 94.

[211]See Blaskic, ICTY Trial Chamber,
March 3, 2000, para. 257.Blaskic (paras. 258-259) listed factors
from which could be inferred knowledge of the context:

[a] the historical and political circumstances in which the acts of
violence occurred; [b] the functions of the accused when the crimes were
committed; [c] his responsibilities within the political or military hierarchy;
[d] the direct and indirect relationship between the political and military
hierarchy; [e] the scope and gravity of the acts perpetrated; [f] the nature of
the crimes committed and the degree to which they are common knowledge.

[212]See, e.g., United Nations General
Assembly Resolution 3074, "Principles of international cooperation in the
detention, arrest, extradition and punishment of persons guilty of war crimes and
crimes against humanity," December 3, 1973.Under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and
Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which Ethiopia is a party, the same
obligation applies with respect to individuals who have committed acts of
torture, irrespective of whether such acts are also classified as crimes
against humanity.